July the fourth: a day to celebrate the two hundred twenty-fourth anniversary of the instance in which the colonists gained exclusive rights over the English to exterminate the indians; see local retailer for minature pipebombs and other explosives of revel.
But anyway....
I noticed exactly how busy I've been lately. I finally got round to seeing Mission to Mars last night. At this point, you've either seen it, or abandoned it; there shouldn't be much concern over spoilers--especially after the adverts gave away most of the plotline anyway.
So...in the year twenty twenty [not to be confused with the year twenty-five twenty-five, for Zager&Evans fans] the Mars Mission finally gets launched. Even though it'll probably be launched within the next year or two. And things go wrong, since Gary Sinise can't be an astronaut in films where nothing goes wrong. And they ultimately find out that life on Earth is the result of the evacuation of Mars at some point. Which bugged me. Unless I misheard the line, they accused life of having originated on Earth a hundred million years ago. Which means that monocellular life appeared at about the same time as Deinonychus antirrhopus. Strange.
I've considered the possibility that life didn't technically begin on Earth. There's a mathematical concern there. The Earth [and probably the system of Sol] is forty-six hundred thousand million years old; life is thirty-nine hundred thousand million years old; the planet was seven hundred million years old when life appeared. Which is possible, but not terribly probable. Theists were told about it, and have been assuring us that it's proof of a god. i don't think so.
At best, you've got the deistic concept of an older alien lifeform planting monocellular life on Earth as a science project. The Universe is two hundred billion years old; an older planet could take billions of years to develop life; that life could become interstellar within, say, ten billion years...maybe less...and might go out into the cosmos to cultivate more life--and not necessarily for any more reason than people build antfarms. Who knows.
But: Mars isn't really any older than Earth. The idea that life began on Mars, evacuated after a comet ragnarocked whatever civilisation had lived there, and sent bacteria to--among other places--Earth...fails to help the math much.
Or maybe I'm just upset because the entire plotline has been the opening to LK2 for the last eight years. Hard to say.
I should really start publishing things the minute the ink is dry. Or the minute the .pdf is encoded.
The NotS CDRom CG [CGRom; whatever you'd call it] is plotted. It's still rendering the raytrace, and will be for a while. But we're past the dumb frames--the ones which take half an hour to raytrace one thirtieth [or, technically one 29.97th] of a second. I think we're down around three minutes per frame at the moment. There are about eight hundred frames to go.
Then, the frames are compiled into a film, and sound is added in. And that about it, since the final film is fifteen megs in wireframe, without sound. I'm guessing it'll end up between thirty and forty megs on the disc. A little too big to upload--especially since people are still on dialups out there. But if I can get the Sony's modem to work somehow--or if I just burn the frames to disc: I'll probably upload a few frames out of this. Some of the stills are kinda cool.
About NotS: we beat the computer at Borders. Somehow, the thing didn't quite accept the book the first time, which kinda sucks. A couple hundred people have walked in and asked where the book could be found, and the 'droids running the counter had no idea what they were talking about. But the ISBN has bee resubmitted, and shoud be appearing on the network now. So it's probably safe to go back and try again. I don't know which section the book would be in in any given store. In some places, it's under Local Interest [particularly in Des Moines and Denver] and in others it falls under Humour. Some places might list it under NonFiction, which would be kinda strange; some might call it Fiction, which would also be strange. The thing defies categorisation.
One thing which absolutely works is to send a cheque for US$17.90 '$14.95+$2.95] to Rainbow Ridge Publications at 1990 150th in Indianola, Iowa 50125; just write 'NotS' in the memo section, since RRP distribute other novels too.
Loosely on the subject: BangBang played his final card. He EMailed me as ZipMon, which showed up on my system as BangBang even before I read it. I gave it to Hunter. She talked to him a bit, not letting on that she knew it was him. He--as Zippy here--assured her that he--as BangBang--had lots of options [like suing everyone for this seinfeldian insensitivity and all] if the FBI arrested him. His best idea was that, if the case went public, people would find out what i look like, and there would be spoofs on Saturday Night Live. Okay. Except...if there were a spoof on SNL, I'd probably be in on it. BangBang's the only one who takes me seriously; personally, I don't believe half the things I say.
As for the whole Secret Identity thing that BangBang's counting on, it's irrelevant. And it's about to expire anyway. When LK0 is released in a few weeks, it's not going to matter anymore. If it ever did.
So: that's over. BangBang's finally figured out that he's lost. Good.
More Later...