Mirage

If men became monsters,
And preyed on those they loved,
Would you still care for them,
And their soft hands, however gloved?

Their caress, would it still dwell within?
Is this flesh, nothing more than red flesh?
Are our bodies but fine, and paper thin?
Mere bonds against for our souls to thresh?

And if a monster grew so tame,
That it loved you as a son,
Would you still laugh to see its pain,
And broil it with your gun?

If a man becomes a monster,
Or a monster to a man,
Do their true selves seek to conquer?
To escape this, if it can?

What are we then, but cogs?
In a spinning whirling plan?
Are we wandering through fog?
Ending as ignorant as we began?

Mirages flicker before us,
As we wander through the desert.

We call them time.
And life.
And death.
And hope.
And despair.
And beginnings.
And ends.
And monsters.
And lovers.
And mothers and fathers.
The greatest of these illusions,
The strange idea,
That we are all seeing the same things.
And that any of them are different, to the sand of the desert.

Apologies:

Sometimes the gaps between my posts on here are greater than others.

I'm not going to say sorry for that. Many folk do. This is MY damn blog. I'm not being paid to write on it. I try to make it entertaining if I can. If you don't like my late night ramblings, then go elsewhere.

Oh no, I didn't mean it. Please stay.

Look, if you're a reader who is annoyed by the infrequent nature of my posts, I'm sorry. I like you. You're sweet for reading. And if you genuinely enjoy the content, then thankyou even more. But I'm not apologising to myself for not writing. I only write when I get the jigglies for it. And that is more than enough.

Love and Kisses, Zaphod.

Kobo

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that my faithful ereader of many years screen smashed. I'm buying a new one and it's fine.

Many people complain about ebooks, and how they aren't, 'The same,' or they don't, 'Smell nice,' or that they don't, 'feel right'.

What I think they are really talking about is the emotional connection that a person has to a book they cherish. And the emotional connection that I had with my tired old Kobo ereader (that mum bought me from the now defunct borders, because buying books all the time was too expensive) was there. It was real.

I maintain that we should not love the paper of books, but the content of them, and to a person who cares about what a book says, the format it is in is irrelevant . But still, I do feel a twinge when looking at the ruined screen.

T'was too cruel and ironic a fate that your screen smashed when I accidentally dropped the single volume collected works of H.P Lovecraft on you, which is a very real and very heavy book.

Rest easily in silicone Heaven, with all the iPhones from 'will it blend?', exploded 1980's Blackberrys and Casio calculators that got left in jeans pockets when they went through the wash.

Goodnight sweet Kobo. You were as cool a lump of plastic as ever there was.

Psychic Football

I've an idea for a new fictional sport. But first I need to do some clarifications of definitions.

When I say 'Football' my idea is with what we Australians know as the game of soccer. It's played with your feet, head and chest - no hands. It's quite tactic based, and very much to do with feint and bluff, as well as aerodynamics of spheres (or whatever shape a football is). The specific physical abilities of the players on the team often varies a fair bit, unlike some types of football Australian's play that just involve big beef steaks that know how to plow other guys over.

Having said all that, I'm sure this would work with basketball, or some other competitive group sports. Certain types of hockey maybe. Water-polo would be nifty. I dunno.

Now, to clarify what I mean by 'psychic'.

There is a character in x-men called 'Charles Xavier' who is called a psychic. He rolls around in his wheel-chair reading people's thoughts, projecting visions, making people forget things they used to know, and most importantly, fighting intense mental battles of wills with other psychically powered individuals. If he has complete control over someone's mind, he can control their every action. He can't see into the future or anything. Just mind powers. That's the kind of psychic power I'm taking about.

So. You produce two teams of eleven football players, all of whom have psychic powers. They play football as they normally would. But they are joined together as teams in unions of interconnected minds. They all know exactly what each other is doing at the time, and they act almost as one organism.

Or they would. If the other team wasn't spending a considerable amount of their concentrated mental energy trying to thwart that interconnectedness.

And vice versa. It is as much a battle of the mind as it is a contest of tactics and athleticism.

Why am I thinking about this at three in the morning? Who knows. But I like the idea of this sport where not thinking about the way you are going to score a goal, and thus not give it away to the goal keeper of the opposite team, is a legitimate tool in winning a game.

Perhaps I haven't explained how it would work in enough detail. But it seemed like something worth sharing before I forgot it.

A Well Run Dry

There is nothing that makes fury more furious than impotence.

But really. Putting aside gender metaphor, is there nothing more that infuriates you than knowing that you are right, but not having the words to express your rightness?

I feel much like many have before me, an unwilling soldier in an unwanted war. But all I can do, as I fire my rifle at endless enemy after endless enemy, and stab at the unending necks and chests if of my foes with my bayonet, is continue.

I really do feel as though my options have run dry.

Has the well of my creativity run dry so soon? And if so, where to did it vanish?

Make It Happen?

I absolutely love electronics. Especially small electronics that are portable or pocketable. In fact, any pocketable piece of nifty technology generally makes me weak at the knees.

A huge part of what makes our species so powerful is our ability to harness technology. And the idea that I could take a small sliver of that power, be it in the form of a smartphone, e-reader, or multitool, and slip it into my pocket makes me uncommonly happy.

Marvelous. Totally marvelous.

My trusty old kobo e-reader's screen cracked recently. I liked using it for book reading over my iPad when my eyes got sore from glassily gazing into the LED screen and giving me headaches. The excellent battery life of a week (or even two) between charges was the result if its super low power e-ink display. The only thing I ever really disliked about it was that:

1. It wasn't backlit, making it impractical for nighttime/bus reading.

2. It didn't have a touch screen, which rendered it difficult to use for books with footnotes or picking particular chapters.

Therefore, when I was scouting the web for a replacement reader, I got unreasonably excited over the new 'kindle paperwhite' which has an in-built easy-on-the-eyeballs screen light and a capacitive touch screen.

For those that don't know, there are generally three types of touchscreens in modern devices.

1. Infrared.
This is generally considered to be the worst kind of touchscreen, it uses a series of cris-cross infrared lasers over the screen to tell where a finger or stylus is breaking the pattern, and responding to it. The disadvantages to this are that the screen has to be set in, making the device's thickness increase. It's also not that responsive. But it has a great power consumption rate, which made it popular in e-readers and mid nineties PDA's that ran on AA batteries. A pretty clever trick, considering the comparatively pitifully short battery life of most modern smartphones.

2. Resistive.
This is form of touchscreen works by having a slightly squishy screen that can tell where it's being poked. It has a whole lot of pressure sensitive dots underneath the screen, which will react to fingers, pencils, pens, anything. My girlfriend used to have a phone with this kind of screen, and she liked it because she could text with the ends of her long pretty fingernails. This sounds great in theory, but in practice it means the screen itself is often rather ugly as it can't be made of nice clear glass, but some kind of plastic. But it worked well enough that it was the screen used in many old android phones, and loads of PDA's. Great with 'digital drawing' devices that some artists use.

3. Capacitive.
This is the kind of screen iPhones, Samsung Galaxy's, iPads, and android tabs. A very responsive, attractive glass screen, it functions by running an electric current through the glass itself. Our bodies constantly have a slight bit if electricity in them, and our fingers, when they touch the screen, zingle through it letting the device know where they're touching. It also works with electrosensitive rubber/foam, which is what the ends of iPad styli are made. Nine out of ten touchscreens are this type.

So here's what I want to make.

A touchscreen e-ink mini laptop just for writing. Super long battery life and only basic documents, email and browsing capabilities. Plaster the outside and inside with solar panels. Voila. Perfect travel companion for the writer, student who needs a reliable machine for note taking, or anyone who wants to be able to email their family back home when traveling overseas. Frequently when traveling charging devices is tricky, as you can't always get power adapters to fit foreign ports. So long as you have light, this thing will charge. Fit it with free 3G like in many kindles, and it's still low power enough for great use of the solar panels. Who needs a colour screen if all you're going to do is write on it? All flash storage, it's essentially a kindle paperwhite with a keyboard attached.

Anywho, we have the technology to make all this happen. We just need to apply it.

I love the modern age.