Stepping to the edge of the diving platform he felt a sudden #surge of adrenaline. He was surprised how much higher it looked up here than it did from the pool deck.
“You can do it, son!” his dad yelled from below, an encouraging smile on his face.
He felt his heart pounding, his palms sweating, his vision narrowing.
He looked down one more time, then stepped back from the edge.
He took a deep breath.
He jumped.
They felt the press of acceleration as the rocket engines, a cluster of metallic grey #bells visible on their monitor, began belching fire into the cosmos. She sighed and turned to her partner. “So, we still on for pizza and margaritas when we get back?”
“You’re damn right!” he replied, grinning with excitement. “After three years on Mars I am in desperate need of melted cheese and…”
At that moment they felt the ship lurch beneath them.
“So wanna hear something weird?” he said, taking off his jacket. “I just ran into #JohnMastodon on the way into Walmart. He was standing there greeting people and handing out cupcakes.”
His wife looked up from her crossword. “No kidding!” she said. “I heard he was downtown yesterday giving out free hugs. Apparently he emits the subtle odor of vanilla and clove.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I heard the same thing. Truly we don’t deserve him.”
“I’m telling you,” Paul said, his eyes following the goldfish as she circled the bowl, “she knows her #name. I’m sure of it.”
“Oh come on,” Greg replied, “how would you even know?”
“Lucille,” Paul said, waving at the glass, “hey, Lucille!”
Years later, and after a few drinks, Greg would swear that goldfish tilted its body and, with a flick of its little fin, waved right back.
“Holy shit,” he said, astonished. “We gotta tell Rich about this!”
Rich, resident conspiracy theorist, was surprisingly respectable, his closely trimmed beard and precisely styled hair giving him the air of a moderately successful realtor. “Levitation, huh?” he said.
“Yeah, like I said on the phone, a full three inches!” He could feel his friend leaning in.
“Two and a half,” she corrected.
“I’m just rounding to the nearest #inch!”
As his feet left the floor Rich leaned back, his face #neutral. “I’ve seen better.”
By some miracle the physicist kept his face carefully #neutral. “Bitcoin?” he replied.
“Yeah!” the investor said, grinning with an energy that could only be described as manic. “Bitcoin! This ‘fusion’ thing could be huge for our crypto portfolio. We used to just fire up old coal plants, but the damn government put a stop to that.”
“Wow,” the physicist replied, beginning to question his life choices. “That’s, uh, too bad.”
“The Green Mile,” he replied. “Now that movie is #cathartic. Hits me in all the feels. So what about you?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” his friend said, “The Wrath of Khan.”
“Wait,” he replied, incredulous. “Like, Star Trek?”
“Yeah man. That ending? ‘I have been and shall always been your friend’? Dude, I bawl every time.”
“Oh yeah,” he replied. “Alright, let’s watch that!”
When he heard the scraping he knew it had happened again. “Damn it,” he muttered, a sinking feeling in his chest. “Doug is shoveling our walk again, isn’t he?”
His wife pushed a curtain aside. “He’s just trying to be nice,” she replied, watching their neighbour work.
“But now I have to #reciprocate!’ he said, throwing up his hands. “We can’t be in shovel debt, honey!”
She looked at her husband. “What broke you?”
He turned to her. “I wish I knew!”
The snowflake could feel the wind speed pick up as it fell, it’s excitement rising with every gust. “Oh wow this is amazing!” the snowflake said to a nearby flake as they swirled and danced together.
“This isn’t even the best part!” the other flake replied as an updraft caught them, carrying them over the #cozy houses below. “Once this #blizzard really gets going and those wind gusts pick up, it’s gonna be great!”
Replacing the tea #cozy, he took a sip of steaming oolong and smiled as his daughter scrutinized the board, the white and black stones forming an intricate pattern between them. The game was a close one, far closer than any they’d played yet, and it was now down to one last life and death problem. When she confidently smacked her stone down on the board his smile opened into a grin. “I resign.”
“Now,” he said, pushing his glasses up his nose, “having filled out form 15 stroke D you can head to the office on the third floor to fill out a form requesting a project manager be assigned.”
“Alright, and then we can get started?” she asked, exasperated, the #capricious corporate bureaucracy slowly chipping away at her remaining humanity.
“That depends on a number factors. Here, let me show you the flow chart.”
“A #frozen margarita,” he said with a sigh.
“Really?” she replied, “that’s it? That’s what you’d pick?”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice wistful. “A nice lime margarita. Mezcal. Smoked salt on the rim.” He pushed his shovel into the red soil.
“Shit. Now I want one!” she replied. She looked up at Phobos passing overhead, just visible in the Martian dusk. “Alright, when we get back to Earth, we’re having pepperoni pizza and margaritas.”
“No! Quit looking at me like that!” he said, refusing to make eye contact. He could feel her gaze on him.
“It won’t work. I’m #immune to your little tricks.”
She continued to stare at him with those big eyes, a plaintive look on her face.
Minutes went by.
“Fine,” he finally said, getting up and going to the treat cupboard. “But only one.”
She wagged her tail enthusiastically and followed him into the kitchen. How did she always win?
It seemed like a good idea when he’d first gotten off the lift. “Sure, let’s do that double black,” he said. “I think I’m ready.”
As they approached the edge of the first pitch he felt his self-confidence #plummeting. “Uh. I’m not sure this is such a good idea,” he said.
“It’ll be fine!” his girlfriend replied, flashing a huge grin. “You got this!”
He took a deep breath, feeling her infectious enthusiasm. “Alright. Screw it. Let’s go!”
Well, I’m doing it. I’m taking a full three weeks off over Christmas: two weeks of staycation and then a ski trip first week of January. If I do it right that’ll mean time to hack on jekyll-webmention_io, do a bit of writing, play with my Steam Deck until my thumbs stop working, and then ski until I fall down. It will be glorious!
They stood before an enormous wall of steel, pipes, and cladding made of exotic materials, the machine a culmination of decades of research representing the absolute pinnacle of human knowledge.
“What you’re looking at,” the physicist said, barely containing his excitement, “is the first example of break-even #artificial nuclear fusion.”
“Incredible!” replied the investor. “And how many Bitcoin did you say we could mine with this?”
So for anyone following me, you should be aware that I hope to do the MastoPrompt every day in December, which means your timelines will be occupied by bad microfiction inspired by the prompt word of the day. You have been warned! Or… inspired…?
He stared at the screen, fingers poised over the keyboard, waiting for a #stroke of inspiration. Writer’s block. It had been a while. But here it was, that old familiar friend, the kind that you can lose touch with for years and then pick up right where you left off.
Maybe if he tried something different. “You know,” he thought, “I’ve never broken the fourth wall.”
At that very moment he was overcome by the feeling of being watched…
“Me? Nothing new. Still living the dream. Same job as before. Yeah, marketing stuff. And I’m still writing. Well, trying to. Uh, and I grew a mustache and shaved it off. Too much grooming. Look, I’ll level with you—absolutely nothing is going on with me, and I couldn’t be happier.”
“So you say you can levitate by sheer force of will?” the man asked, the editor of a local conspiracy theory newsletter.
“That’s right. A full three inches!”
“Two,” his friend corrected. “You gotta stop embellishing things.”
He waved her back.
“Alright, come down and we’ll test the #veracity of your claims.”
“Great!” he replied, hanging up and turning to his friend. “Alright, let’s go! But first, where’s my measuring tape…”
He gently brushed the dirt away from the new find, an Egyptian cosmetic #palette, perfectly preserved, its face adorned in delicate carvings.
“Beautiful,” he muttered to himself, already thinking of the paper he would write about the piece.
Until, that is, a man with a hat and a whip came charging through his dig site, gunfire following in his wake.
“My mom was right,” he thought, “I should’ve become a dentist.”
The sheet of paper lay before her, an infinity of possibilities. She made the first fold, aligning point to point, the crease #crisp, precise. Working, her hands traveled through valleys and over mountains, her mind calm, focused.
Done, she leaned back, sighing, only to be startled by the sound of chirping! Looking down, she gaped as her little sparrow took flight, vanishing through an open window.
Smiling, she reached for a fresh sheet of paper.
So I think (hope) I’ve got image captions working on my blog. To prove it, a little something from our trip to Newfoundland, Spillar’s Cove to be exact.
As they walked the planet was visible through the ship’s dome, blue-green against velvet blackness. “So they organized society around this ‘money’,” she said, still unable to believe what she was hearing.
“Correct,” he replied, “and those with the most were venerated above all others and seen as a source of safety and security.”
“And this ‘Douglas Adams’ that you mentioned?”
“He was one of the few who realized the whole thing was a bad idea.”
Well, originally I was using bridgy-fed to stitch this blog directly into the fediverse, but after running into various challenges, I’m going to try bridgy instead and just syndicate to my personal Mastodon account. Let’s see how this goes!
Every now and then I think about growing my beard back. But I quickly realize that’s not a commitment I’m willing to make…
Journalling, for me, is a kind of ritual during which I enter into a conversation with myself and all those little demons floating around inside my head and we all get to know each other a bit bit better.
Today, I’m grateful that, by making the choice to post to my blog and syndicate from there, I’ve been able to retain control over my posts even if I delete them from Twitter.
I hoped that Elon wouldn’t go nuts with moderation thanks to advertiser pressure, but with this tweet it’s official and so I’m shutting down my bird account. Follow me on Mastodon or my blog if you dare!
I kinda wonder what it must’ve been like in the old days when staying updated on world news meant occasionally getting a month-old letter from a relative, delivered via ocean liner…
Trawling through the Micro.blog discover feed or the timeline of my preferred Mastodon instance feels like the intellectual equivalent of grazing…
Review: Circe
Review of Circe by Madeline Miller (9780316556347)★★★★
I noticed I haven’t written a long-form post in quite a while so I figured I’d get back into it with a review of Circe.
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child--neither powerful like her father nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power: the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.
Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts, and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.
But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from or with the mortals she has come to love.
I have to admit it’s been a while since I read Circe, so this review is probably gonna be a) a bit short, and b) based on fuzzy recollections. But, I’ll do my best with what I can recall.
If you’ve not heard of the book, Circe is a mythological retelling, and I have to admit, I really wish I was more familiar with my Greek mythology because, even based on the limited knowledge I do have, Madeline Miller’s work in adapting this tale is really pretty astonishing. Through beautiful prose and incredible characterization she manages to find the humanity in this ancient and epic story.
Continue reading...So I just started using fed.brid.gy for stitching my blog into the Fediverse (which is also a static site), and I think maybe it’ll do what you need? In fact, this reply you’re reading now is actually posted on my blog (if you click the permalink it’ll take you directly there).
Ladies and gentlemen take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice.
An ActivityPub feed for a blog is absolutely doable, it just requires work. For example, a quick search turns up an ActivityPub plugin for Wordpress. Heck, micro.blog supports it natively. There’s also bots out there that’ll auto-syndicate posts from an RSS feed to a Mastodon account. Unfortunately it’s just not very widely available or adopted (yet!).
Given my job these days I forget how much I enjoy throwing on a set of headphones, putting my favourite album on repeat, firing up Vim, and willing something into existing that didn’t exist before I started.
I figured it was about time to try and stitch my blog into the fediverse. Is this thing on?
You gotta give Elon credit, he’s come up with a surprisingly novel, if expensive, method of finally driving people out of their social media silos and into the arms of the indieweb and fediverse…
Well, I’ve removed the ‘blog’ subdomain from my site, which was both seemingly simple and yet likely to break things in subtle and unexpected ways…
I finally got the tools and swapped my own winter tires this year. It was the greatest sense of real personal accomplishment that I’ve felt in a long time…
Given the recent purchase of Twitter I’m sure glad that all of my posts start on my blog and then syndicate elsewhere. It’s a lot easier to ignore Musk’s gyrations when you know you can drop Twitter any time you like…
First real virtual ride on via Zwift (huge shoutout to @netweed for his docker container, which is the only way I’ve managed to get it running on Linux) and man, does it ever tap into my competitive side… maybe a little too much…
I’m honestly a bit upset that this weekend was my first visit to the Peyto Lake lookout on the Icefield Parkway (and yes I took this photo)…
Review: Morning Star
Review of Morning Star (Red Rising #3.0) by (9780345539847)★★★
While this is the last book in the Red Rising series, this is actually an attempted review of the whole thing since I was too last to post about the previous instalments…
Darrow would have lived in peace, but his enemies brought him war. The Gold overlords demanded his obedience, hanged his wife, and enslaved his people. But Darrow is determined to fight back. Risking everything to transform himself and breach Gold society, Darrow has battled to survive the cutthroat rivalries that breed Society’s mightiest warriors, climbed the ranks, and waited patiently to unleash the revolution that will tear the hierarchy apart from within.
Finally, the time has come.
But devotion to honor and hunger for vengeance run deep on both sides. Darrow and his comrades-in-arms face powerful enemies without scruple or mercy. Among them are some Darrow once considered friends. To win, Darrow will need to inspire those shackled in darkness to break their chains, unmake the world their cruel masters have built, and claim a destiny too long denied—and too glorious to surrender.
Disclaimer: I have to admit I did not keep any notes during the reading of this series, so a lot of my recollections are gonna be vague and non-specific. Frankly, this review is mostly for me so I remember roughly how I felt having completed this series if ever I look back and wonder about it.
Red Rising. I don’t know about you, dear reader (… is there anybody out there…), but among my circle of friends, this series got no shortage of hype. One friend even put the series up there with A Song of Ice and Fire on his list of all-time favourite series. I’ve seen folks praise the world building, the plot, the characters, and of course, Darrow himself.
But I admit it: I honestly just don’t get it.
Continue reading...