Originally published at A Singularity. You can comment here or there.

Abnegation

Used in a sentence:

• There had been an abnegation of key facts in the case, despite his using every lawful trick in the book he could remember, leading to its dismissal.

Source: Wiktionary

Commentary:

So another fancy way of saying renunciation or negate or both! You’re welcome!

Originally published at A Singularity. You can comment here or there.

Not Enough Memory
By Nojh Livic

“Here is what I don’t understand,” Amon began, waving his hand towards the assembling crowds. Hasim used an infinite amount of willpower not to roll his eyes at his friend, mostly by focusing his attention on the crowds. The stadium was filling in quickly with over three-quarters of standing room filled in under a half an hour. Amon and Hasim had been one of the first inside and were therefore accorded a prime view of the stadium floor, after the eram, who used the three rows of benches ahead of them. The eram, unlike the masses of terum, had the luxury a guaranteed unobstructed view of the coming proceedings and therefore were less inclined to rush to their seats when the doors opened. This left Amon a nice clear view of the floor where a blue orb was set into the ground inside a huge inscribed circle. It pulsed slowly and rhythmically with light.

“Don’t you think?” Amon finished, turning his attention to his friend, only to find him staring at the floor below. Amon smacked Hasim on the shoulder. “Hey! Don’t stare!” the older man hissed quickly. Hasim shook his head and turned away slightly.

“Sorry. I got distracted,” Hasim said even as his eyes began to slide back to the floor. Amon grabbed his shoulder and turned him around to face him, much like most of the others in the crowd were doing. Eyes averted looking directly at the gleaming orb emitting light up towards the open sky of the stadium. Those who brought their children were having to keep them from looking as well. They all, however, felt the allure of the light.

“Exactly. We all trundle in here like camels to an oasis, knowing we’re denied the pleasures of the light. There’s no point. We might as well all stay home. None of us will be chosen,” Amon ranted. Hasim noted his friend was drawing a few looks from those behind him. He gave his friend a meaningful look, nodding. Amon didn’t take the hint. “Yet worse, you and I are near the head of the pack. At least the ones in the back won’t feel it as badly. You know I hear they measured width of the power. That the only reason why there are seats from this point on is that one doesn’t have the strength to stand so close for the length of the ceremony.”

Amon was trudging very close to heresy and was now drawing looks from a few of the parents in the crowd. Hasim jabbed his friend in the stomach once, hard. Amon, who was taking in a breath to say more, had it knocked out of him. He would have tumbled forward if Amon hadn’t caught him. They leaned against the diving stone railing that kept them from the eram seats. “Careful my friend. There are words reserved for drawn curtains,” he advised the older man. Amon seemed to nod, although he might have simply been gasping for breath.

Hasim patted his friend on the back and spared a quick glance towards the light again, disappointed to find that enough of the eram in their blue robes had taken seats to block a good view of the stadium floor. He grew both excited and nervous as the number meant that the ceremony would start soon.

“I will recall it this time,” Hasim vowed quietly, more to himself than Amon. Amon, who had mostly recovered his breath, didn’t bother to hide his disdain filled eye rolls. Hasim understood. Nobody remembered the ceremony. This would be his fifth attendance. He had resolved to remember everything that happened, rather than the vague dreamlike memories he had from prior visits that everybody experienced. Everybody’s accounts varied save for the sense of overwhelming calm and peace, as well as the longing to find that calm and peace again.

“Your memory techniques?” Amon asked. Hasim only nodded.

“You know you almost feel entranced not a few moments ago. Where were you memory techniques then?” Amon asked.

“I wasn’t prepared,” Hasim admitted. Most of the benches were full. A hush was slowly settling over the crowds.

“Well better start. Here come the priestess,” Amon pointed towards the glint of silver appearing in the gaps between the blue robes of the eram in front of them.

Hasim held his breath and began to focus. Unlike the others of the crowds in the standing room, who turned their backs to the ceremony, he remained looking forward like the eram. He concentrated on letting his eyes unfocused and slowly let out his breath, trying to direct his attention out and around him while keeping focusing on taking long deep breaths. He would reme-

—

Great lights so bright they blinded him twice over. He felt pain in every inch of his body. Pleasure too but only as a light salt to the sweetness of the pain. There was agony all around him; cries both human and inhuman echoing through the stadium. Escape was all he could think of. He walked. He pushed. He ran. He jumped. Nothing changed but he knew he was making progress. Red filled his vision, then silver, then blue. The screams where omnipresent but further away now. The chanting was closer. There was warmth but greater pain.

Then there was clarity.

He knew not the creature before him. It denied all words of description he had been taught. Around it were the priestess, their robes discarded, prostrate in a circle around it. He stood just inside the great circle but outside of it were the masses. Light streamed from every direction, a multitude of flowing colors, from the crowds that he had been apart of towards the creature. If it had something resembling an orifice, he was unsure, it used it to feed upon this light, while other parts of its anatomy writhed across the floor to touch not just the priestess but the eram in the seated benches before it.

He stood transfixed, taking all of this in. He was not alone. Where were several other fellow terum who had made it to the circle. They too stood looked around in confusion. One he recognized. The woman who had taught him the memory techniques. He opened his mouth to call out to her.

Then the creature touched him.

—

-ber. Hasim screamed. The rest of the people around him were shaking their heads as if trying to shake grogginess from their minds. Several startled and back peddled away from Hasim. Hasim clutched at his head. There was no calm. There was no peace. No fuzzy memories. He remembered the pain. He remembered it all. And all of it pained him.

“Hasim? You’ve been chosen?” Amon asked worriedly, reaching out to touch his friend who was wildly looking down towards the stadium floor now. The eram and the priestess were gone, as was usual. “Hasim? What’s wrong?” Amon asked, grabbing the younger man’s shoulders. The orb too was dim, shedding no light. There was no sign of it. Hasim broke the older man’s grip and leapt over the stone divide, into the forbidden place of the eram and towards the circle. Amon reached to grab him but it was too late. “Hasim!” Amon yelled.

Hasim ran for the circle, tugging at his robes. He could feel where it had touched him. There was not just a numbness but an emptiness so profound. His robes fell away as he entered the circle. Already the guards of the eram were filling into the floor, spears pointed towards him but he gave them no mind. Those who looked directly upon his chest actually hesitated a step.

He was marked. His skin a horrible pale stain of asymmetric design that resembled nothing natural. Hasim touched it and felt nothing, not even the tips of his fingers. What was worse he could feel the mark growing. Not across his skin but down into it. He had to stop it.

“Hasim!” Amon yelled again, as if he could scream some sense into his friend from afar, but Hasim realized that his voice was too close. He turned to see his older friend had followed him to the floor of the stadium. He was also yelling to warn him of the guard who brandished a spear and charging at Hasim. By turning around he showed his disfigurement to the charging guard. The guard’s eyes bulged at the sight and he stumbled back involuntarily. Amon too, being several strides away, halted his run with a skid, staring.

“I have no heart!” Hasim screamed up towards the darkening sky. It was true. He could no longer feel his heart beat nor his lungs filling with air. He was numb on the inside and the feeling only grew. As if to assist his claim, the guard who had stumbled back gathered his courage and thrust the spear forward. A solid blow driven into where Hasim’s heart should have been. Instead the spear struck the pale mark and was swallowed, no blood spewing forth. The tip and haft simply sunk into the man impossibly far, not merging from the opposite side.

The guards fled then. The few spectators in the stadium who had the willpower to stay now too found their courage fleeing them and left to chase it. Only Amon remained, kneeling in the sandy floor strides from his friend. Hasim looked at Amon sadly. Amon stared blankly at his friend, his mouth agape.

Hasim carefully pulled the spear from his breast intact, his the mark unmarred. He was numb now, from the neck down. He knew he would be dead. His body might yet remain animated but that which made him Hasim would cease to exist in moments. “Good bye, my friend. Please, do not remember,” Hasim said to Amon, then turned and fell head first upon his spear. His body and the spear clattered to the ground, spraying blood upon the orb.

Amon continued to stare in shock, only barely registering his friend’s suicide, or that the orb beneath him had begun to glow. In that blue glow he reme-

—

He felt the pain and the pleasure but he did not scream like the others. He felt it not as they did but as he would around them. Their pain and their pleasure radiated from them. Beside him his partner and friend screamed the loudest. He always screamed the loudest. Unlike before he was flailing. The eram had taken notice and were removing him from the stands, carrying him to the circle where it stood. He couldn’t look at it. He knew that if he did, it would notice him and he would feel the pain the others hand. He had to pretend. He had to shake, writhe, and worship. It was the only way to survive.

—

-bered, his own repressed memories surfacing. “No,” Amon whispered, defiantly climbing to his feet. More guards had appeared, as did several priestesses. The guards kept their distance but the silver swathed women were hurrying towards him. Each step he took strengthened his resolve and he covered the strides between himself and his friend’s body easily. He grabbed the haft of the spear and pulled it free. The tip was stained with Hasim’s blood.

“No!” hissed the closest woman as he held the spear in two hands above his head and pointed the tip down towards the orb. Up close it glowed brightly and while it held his attention, his anger and fear kept his wits from being absorbed by its false promise.

He thrust the spear down. The orb shattered. Amon knew nothing more.

Originally published at A Singularity. You can comment here or there.

8-Bit Theater: 2007-03-17: Early Edition

I’m still reading through the archive of 8-Bit Theater as I never finished it. I’m in a section of comics I never read before and this one struck me as rather hilarious. Particularly Red Mage’s comment in the second to last panel.

8-Bit Theater: 2007-03-22: Half of a Good Idea

That last line is golden.

Girls With Slingshots: 2012-05-02: Guest Strip: Dave Barrack

I laughed out loud at this one. Especially it being a work in progress.

Questionable Content: #2178: Graven Imagery

The girl’s interpretation amuses me greatly.

Originally published at A Singularity. You can comment here or there.

Estuary

Used in a sentence:

• The horse had alacrity but it just didn’t have nimbleness it needed to dodge the obstacles.

Source: Wiktionary

Commentary:

I want to say this word was on one of my spelling lists back in grade school. It is hauntingly familiar. While not as fun to pronounce as some of our words it is still a very useful word to know if you’re trying to describe a map or a location a long a coast. What person hasn’t had that come up in conversation every other day or so?

Originally published at A Singularity. You can comment here or there.

Writing Sessions

Word Count: ~800

Actually it might be more. Hi! Its been awhile. I’ve been writing, mostly. Perhaps not as much as I should or as diligently as I’d like. I’ve written 3,593 words on everlasting since my last update, and fleshed out around five pages of Matrix since then. Also been keeping up with my free writes for the website, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. That’s been taking up my hour and a half or less long session of writing twice a week. If I get any more done, I’ll probably need to start scheduling more time.

Writing sessions have been chaotic affairs. As per norm they mostly encompass me or sometimes Daniel. I’ve found no one else interested in joining regularly. I’m starting to get to the point where I’m going to need critique on my work, so I may have to resort to looking for writing groups in my area, which will be hard for me. We’ll see though.

Everlasting Update

Word Count: 111, 434

I emailed Mur Lafferty of I Should Be Writing regarding if I should keep working on Everlasting or just skip to writing the ending and get to editing. Her advice, of course, was just to push through. Which is what I am doing. Writing today came rather easily. I’m trying not to judge or edit as I think about it, but I so want to sit down and plan out a better outline and flow for this story. I’m not even sure I like the ending I have planned anymore. Since its been two months and I’ve only written 3000+ words, I obviously haven’t been writing much on it, which means I’ve been taking a break. Actually I wrote a short story, which now needs editing. But obviously that break didn’t do much to help my motivation. I just need to keep chugging along.

Short Story: Station

Word Count: 6,799

Its working title is Station. It actually came out of a writing prompt from Writing Excuses. I was attempting to write some  Free Writing and it ended up running way longer than a free write but I was enjoying it. So I wrote it. I’ll go back to edit it sometime soon. After I’ve made some more headway in Everlasting.

The basic plot point is a space gas station attendant is bored because she took an extended week-long shift. Due to a strange but well-known astrological effect, all communication with the planet is cut off for the entire week. So no ships were going to refuel at her station. She was basically there in case something went wrong. She planned on using the time to catch up on her entertainment media and get some alone time, only to find out someone had erased all her media. So after a few days of going stir crazy, she wishes for something, anything, to happen. And that’s when something does.

It is a far future transhuman sci-fi story. I’ll probably talk about it more when I get back to editing it.

—

So that’s it for me. I’ll try to post more regularly.

Originally published at A Singularity. You can comment here or there.

The Viewers
By Nojh Livic

“And… release,” Justin ordered, smoothly pointing towards the screen. The technician at station two hit a button and the screen when white only to be followed by static. Justin did not have to make a motion for an image filled the screen again, this time displaying camera two’s field of view according to the label at the bottom of the screen. It showed two figures backlit by a huge explosion. They were running away only to be blown forward off their feet. The pair managed to keep a death grip on each other’s hands as they fell forward. The man fell on his face while the woman kept a knee under her.

Justin could feel the tension in the room. He slowly pushed his hand forward and the image on the screen slowly zoomed in towards the fallen man. He was perhaps in his mid twenties wearing a jumpsuit of brown and blue. He was not moving. Justin’s eyes flickered to a smaller screen in a console in front of him which was showing the feed from camera five. An operator at station three was keeping camera five trained directly on the woman’s face. She was coughing and recovering from the explosion. With a flicker on his other hand that feed was now on the dominant screen. He panned it slightly so that both her face and her grip on man’s hand was in view. “Stand by audio two,” Justin said to the room. Behind him the lead audio engineer began typing at his console. Most of the rest of the room, in contrast, had their eyes glued to the screen.

The woman tugged at the man’s hand as she tried to wave away smoke from in front of her face. She opened her mouth to say something. “Audio,” Justin ordered.

“David,” the woman coughed and tugged on the man’s hand again. Justin switched to the wider view, framing both David and the woman, who also wore a jump suit like the man save that hers was red and gray. With his other hand he took direct control of camera five and  manipulated it to zoom in on the woman’s face again. The was not making any attempt to stand up. “David?” the woman repeated, turning towards the fallen man, still on her knees.

“Clean the air!” Justin barked. More technicians began typing away at their consoles. Within a second the view of both of them was clear of the smoke from the explosion. The woman didn’t notice. She shifting her glances between the man’s head and the death grip he had on her hand while trying to shake him awake.

“David, get up. David!” the woman’s cry was far more urgent now. She spared a glance back in the direction of the explosion’s origin. On camera three the operator had a close up of the face down man but it didn’t tell Justin anything. Instead, he glanced at his own console which had to the side a vitals read out. Justin nodded to himself. He scanned the row of small monitors, looking for the prime shot.

“Sir! Camera one is operational again,” the operator at station one reported. Justin saw his smaller monitor of camera one flicker back to life. The static had been replaced with the exact image he was looking for. He waved one hand at the view of the two people and it vanished. A blasted landscape replaced them at the edge of which lay a humanoid robot, scorched and mostly in pieces, twitching. Justin let that image hang for several heart beats before he panned the camera slowly up. Several robotic legs, followed by torsos, arms, and heads, were revealed as they marched forward into view, obviously unmarred metallic skin gleaming in the dusk light. Their optic ports glowing a menacing red.

“Oh no. David, please no,” the woman’s voice was carrying over the speakers even as the view showed the relentless march of at least three more drones. Justin checked his monitors before flipping back to three for the wide view of the pair. The man was now on his side and the woman was touching his face with her free hand. Camera five had a good close up on his face. His eyes were closed and his lip and nose were bloody. He wasn’t responding to anything the woman said.

“Ready cut!” Justin called out. He kept one eye on the main screen, another on camera five, and yet another on camera one. Each time the woman glanced back over her shoulder, he switched to camera one and the relentless march. The woman had stopped pleading for David to wake up and was now just pulling on him and grunting. She showed muscle through her gray and red jumpsuit but she couldn’t bodily lift David. Each time Justin switched back the man’s grip on the woman’s hand was the focal point of the camera.

Time seemed to crawl for everybody in the room. Justin found he was holding his breath. The rest of the staff were leaning forward towards the main view screen or their own consoles. Then Justin’s console flashed a time warning. Justin let his left hand fall and camera five dominated the screen. David’s face filled the entire screen. “Boost audio!” Justin yelled as the side of the woman’s face appeared on the screen. She was leaning in close to press her lips to David’s. Justin’s hand slid to his console and he pressed a single button. David writhed suddenly, mid-kiss, and bucked. The woman gasped and the man’s eyes shot open. “Catherine!” he exclaimed.

“CUT!” Justin barked and the main engineer slapped their console. The main screen went gray and the audio of the two died. Catherine was saying something animatedly, pointing towards the direction of the robots, and tugging on David’s arm, who was now groggily standing up but most of the room was ignoring that. Instead there was applause and even a few cheers.

Justin, at the main chair in the center of the room, looked around the control station, grinned broadly, and raised a hand to acknowledge the applauds. “Thank you, thank you. Settle down. First things first. Post! I need a standard graying between sections four and five. See if you can add a slight hum or ringing. I also need player five a bit more on the pale side until the kiss. And let time slot six know player three has a romantic entanglement and they’ll want to piggy back our raw feed. We’ll all get some bonuses out of this, guys. Good job, all of you.”

The entire room was now abuzz with excitement and some more cheering. Operators stood up and stretched from their pods while engineers clustered to follow Justin’s last commands. From behind him came a quiet clearing of the throat. Justin turned to see a network assistant, out-of-place in her suit and heels. She also wore a not so out-of-place smirk, although most of her attention was still on the data pad she held in one manicured hand.

“Congratulations. The feeds are already reporting the highest viewership yet. Once those scenes past delay you’ll likely have shattered every reality television record for the last ten years,” the woman said. Her tone was cool but Justin could sense the admiration behind the mask.

Justin just smiled broadly and inclined his head in acknowledgment. “Anything for the viewership,” he said, waving to the screen where the pair were fleeing their robotic pursuers slowly. David was leaning on Catherine to support an obvious hurt leg. Terror was evident on both of their faces.

The assistant simply tapped her pad and the monitor turned off, sending the couple to another time slot room to handle. “Indeed,” she agreed. “Anything for the viewers.”

Originally published at A Singularity. You can comment here or there.

There have been times when I’ve wanted to discuss social issues with people, not to convince them of the point, but to try to help evolve my own understanding by getting their opinions and beliefs. And instead of having the discussion, the person decided they didn’t want to discuss it. This has happened to me multiple times with different people, from close friends to friendly strangers.

But there are some social issues that need to be discussed. Over on my Tumblr I posted a video that explains the fight for women’s suffrage to the music of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance. Do you think at the time discussing whether women had the right to own property or vote in political elections was a polite topic at the dinner table? A good majority of men and women felt different than a smaller group of women regarding the issue. It required people like Alice Paul to bring the issue to people’s attention and get them talking about it, realizing the idea and implications. As more people thought about it, rather than simply forming their beliefs based upon the status-quo, the movement  garnered support until women were considered equal citizens to men, at least in word if not always in practice.

One social issue that also needs to be discussed is sexuality. I could explain why but a recent post by Seanan McGuire, author of over a dozen stories, I think sums it up a little better. Show, don’t tell: why they need to be there by Seanan McGuire.

I was recently talking to a friend* of mine who is also a writer about inclusion and inclusiveness in fiction. He was frustrated. Why did people keep asking him to include a non-heterosexual character in a starring role in his work? After all, he’d said that non-hetero characters existed, and were actually the norm. It was right there, in black and white. So why wasn’t that enough?

…

I explained how, when I was a kid, the only smart blondes I could find were Marilyn Munster and Susan Storm. How I wound up identifying with the Midwich Cuckoos, rather than the humans who they were threatening, because the Cuckoos looked like me and were isolated like me and no one understood them. How, as I got older and realized that what I wanted wasn’t necessarily the kind of marriage my mother had, every gay character became a magical revelation—even the ones I would look at now and think of as stereotyped and cardboard. It was enough for me that they were there.

This argument, of course, hinges on your personal beliefs regarding if certain types of sexuality are morally wrong or right. It appeals to that time when you finally found someone, be it a fictional character or real life hero, who you felt was going through similar problems and conflicts as you, and how you drew strength from the fact that they survived. Maybe not everybody had this experience but I believe that to be unlikely.

Discussing social issues is hard but challenging what we know to be right and understanding that it may be wrong or at the very least, partially incorrect, is a part of what makes us human and what helps us to continue to improve ourselves.

Originally published at A Singularity. You can comment here or there.

As SF Signal is reporting, author Mur Lafferty is offering up all her current eBooks for free for the months of May and June of 2012.

This includes awesome novels like Playing For Keeps, Marco and the Red Granny, and the Afterlife series. I particularly suggest Playing For Keeps and the novella Marco and the Red Granny. You can download the books here.

If you still would like more info about the series, you can read SF Signal’s book descriptions or all the books. Here are the descriptions for Playing For Keeps and Marco and the Red Granny:

Playing For Keeps

The shining metropolis of Seventh City is the birthplace of super powers. The First Wave heroes are jerks, but they have the best gifts: flight, super strength, telepathy, genius, fire. The Third Wavers are stuck with the leftovers: the ability to instantly make someone sober, the power to smell the past, the grace to carry a tray and never drop its contents, the power to produce high-powered excrement blasts, absolute control. over elevators. Bar owner Keepsie Branson is a Third Waver with a power that prevents anything in her possession from being stolen. Keepsie and her friends just aren’t powerful enough to make a difference. at least that’s what they’ve always been told. But when the villain Doodad slips Keepsie a mysterious metal sphere, the Third Wavers become caught in the middle of a battle between the egotistical heroes and the manipulative villains. As Seventh City begins to melt down, it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad, and even harder to tell who may become the true heroes.

Marco and the Red Granny

By bringing back the patronage system, a new alien species has transformed the moon into the new artistic center of the universe, and Sally Ride Lunar Base soon gains the nickname “Mollywood.” These aliens can do amazing things with art and the senses, allowing a painting, for example, to stimulate other senses than simply sight. When someone asks a starlet, “Who are you wearing?” she could as easily say “J.K. Rowling” as she could “Gucci.”

Every creative person in the world wishes for a patronage. It’s quite competitive.

Marco wanted one, once. But then his girlfriend got one and shuttled off to Mollywood for fame and fortune, and Marco stayed home, waiting for his own patron. After several years, he gave up entirely. His career faltered. His agent dumped him. And then, one morning, he gets a call. At last he has a patron, at last the aliens want him. But he’s about to find out that an artistic patronage isn’t what it was in the good old days, and that the only friend he’s made, a tiny old woman who’s the star of a blood sports reality series called The Most Dangerous Game, has secrets of her own.

Originally published at A Singularity. You can comment here or there.

Lacuna

Used in a sentence:

• Lacunae covered the carapace of the creature, providing a false sense of hope that one might find some sort of hole through which to pierce through.

Source: Wiktionary

Commentary:

Formerly Latin and then Italian, the question is was it an English word before it was a scientific word, or vice versa? Another weird word that I like the sound of. Also much easier to say than “a small pit or depression”.  I’ll be trying to work this into my descriptions.

Originally published at A Singularity. You can comment here or there.

While I have yet to experience this change, there has been plenty of people talking about it across blogs and YouTube itself. What is Google doing?

They’re replacing the like button on YouTube videos with a Google Plus button.

And some people, like Wil Wheaton, are angry about it.

One of the reasons why is because professional YouTube users rely upon not just views, but likes, in order to gain revenue. Plus YouTube’s new initiative to launch actual produced channels like Geek and Sundry, are going to use likes similar to television ”Nielsen” ratings.

This means that Google is effective sabotaging YouTube’s rating systems by trying to market their social network. And while I like Google Plus, it is not unlike trying to fill out customer service review survey for that especially helpful phone rep who helped you fix that problem you were having, only to learn you need to sign up for the company’s newsletter before they’ll let you take the survey.