I can see your boogies in your nose :)

And I'm gonna snag that iPhone out of your hand, daddy.

Swimming is fun but...

...then it's cold...

The smartest baby in the world

This is how you use chopsticks!

100 Word Challenge: Myself

Myself. My self. Broken down, it feels so selfish, redundant, repugnant. Wake me up in the age of self awareness. We will look through each other's eyes, revised in realtime--and it will be ourself that we possess. With each new view we'll renew, review, no more me and you. We'll get down with the crayfish and say, "this shellfish is priceless." Soon there will be less of our lot than all the auction block stock. We'll really see beauty from the eye of the beholder and, getting older, watching selfishness methodically morph into shellfish bliss, I think myself we'll miss.

100 Word Challenge via Velvet Verbosity

Wordless Wednesday: Eating the cat

TED: News on the News

Alisa Miller has some interesting insights on why the news does us wrong:
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/248

And she has an awesome skewed world map, which you know I love:



Personally, I think the news industry (television, newsprint, whatever source you like) should be run only as non-profit entities. Profiteering news sources will only provide the most cost-effective and addictive news. These types of stories are generally not the whole picture of our times, nor are they necessarily valuable to our lives.

Oh happy day

Ninja as Child - #17 - Clean

I'm waiting to use the toilet. Someone is in there as they have been forever. I'm 5 years old, grabbing my groin like a stress ball and clumsily swaying with a hop-hop hop. I've got my blue shorts on. It's Summer in Jacksonville, Florida and the heat only intensifies the pungent air. The house smells like the street, which smells like the fast-food joint a couple blocks away--It's bleeding out sun-baked ketchup, as if a fast-food sauce tanker exploded against the edge of a building, spraying the block with it's load. Everything smells like sweet, tangy, red corn syrup and it makes me want to puke.

The hallway is small. There isn't much room for me to run back and forth as I try to dissuade my ass from exploding. I try anyway. Within minutes, I'm stopped at the end of the hallway, facing the empty living room, half-squat, dropping a load in my shorts. As soon as it's done, I mosey like a wide legged cowboy over to the back door, trying with all the grace of a land crab to prevent anything from spilling out. Standing on the back steps, I realize the only tool I have to fish out the excrement is my hand. Luckily, it's solid enough, like an over-sized hamster dropping. Now it's in the grass, staring back up at me, and I wonder if it'll pass as stray dog shit. I wipe my hands in the dry green grass until they smell like chlorophyll corn syrup.

I waltz back in the house, traveling sideways to avoid the stickiness of my shorts. Closing the door, I turn toward the living room and see my step-dad watching TV.

"Shit." It just runs out of my mouth. The world freezes in a foggy blur.

Now I'm in the bathroom and there's a fresh bar of Ivory® soap on the counter, sitting atop it's wrapping. Nam-dad is cutting it up with a knife and fork into quadrants, steady as a soldier. He plunges the fork into one of the pieces and it sinks in as if into a hard block of butter, squeezing out little jagged worms of soap and cracking part of the cube from the center to a side. He thrusts it into my mouth and pulls back the fork, sans soap.

It's bitter, dry, sticking to the roof of my mouth. Every time my teeth gnash at it, an intense, almost sour flavor catches the stream of saliva and works a river of bubbly cleanser over my tongue. The first bite is hard to swallow. I try to chew it as little as possible, which results in it going down hard, trailing residue. The second piece is easier, my mouth already coated with a clean sheen. By the third, my cheeks are stinging and I try to lick the soap off but my tongue, with taste bud anchor points, is supersaturated with the substance. The soap has globbed onto my teeth, creating a smooth bridge between them. I force a smile on my reflection in the metallic sink faucet. My visage is warped as expected but my mouth is foaming and I'm dribbling a little. My molars are flattened, smooth blocks of soap.

My nasal cavity feels salty and dry and I start to think how nice it is not be smelling ketchup.

Nam-dad presents the last chunk of soap and I look at it with stinging eyes.

"At least this is better than fucking ketchup."

Ninjai

I was just reminded of the awesome Ninjai, which dropped offline for a bit when it first came out and I had lost track of it. But here it is:

http://www.ninjai.com/

http://www.ninjai.com/chapters/chapter01

One word: Badass

Trailer from YouTube:

Wordless Wednesday: Monkeeee!

The Age of the Humachine

Within the next 20 years, I predict it to be common for people to voluntarily remove their biological eyes for better prosthetics, bypassing their natural hearing through improved cochlear implants, removing their arms and legs to have the freedom of choice, the improved abilities of technology, hot swappable parts, on the fly transformations. Want to be a mermaid for a day?

We've had cyborgs in our midst for many years. Look at all the people out there with pace-makers. That's probably the most intrusive and unnatural cyborg inhancement we've come up with and we've been doing it for so long. Those people would actually be dead without the mechanical aid. Not that that's uncommon. Hospitals are ripe with cyborg vegetation. I don't anticipate much of a fight. People want this change. I know I do.

\m/

Aimee Mullins on TED, talking about her awesome leg collection:

100 Word Challenge: Snapped

It wasn't the long hours and dull days that did me in. Nor the lonely nights or sordid dreams. I saw some pretty things. Oh, that's not PC; everything's equally ugly. Don't believe me? Turn on the TV. Polyurethane gleams in Beauty Queen daydreams--but who's got the worst beach body, the most poisonous past, the nastiest now, the most ill-fated future? It doesn't make me feel better. And so I snapped--turned off the TV.

Now life is a walk in the park, a stroll on the beach, a laugh at the sunset. How bad is my beach body? You tell me.

Challenge via Velvet Verbosity

Choose Your Own Adventure - 01 - The Hypercave

01. You awaken in a dark cave. The faint morning sun streams through a distant hole to the outside world. Dripping water splashes against rocks behind you and a subtle stream seems to be flowing nearby, inside the cave.

If you would like to explore the stream, visit #09.
If you would like to leave the cave, visit #12.

02. As you stumble along, you begin to hear more than just the dripping water and the gentle stream. The walls are giving more resistance and seem to be moaning.

If you would like to investigate the moaning walls, go to #06
If you would like to ignore the walls and continue on, go to #15

03. As you attack the cave with your Axe of Thor with a +12 against caves... wait... you don't have an axe so you just bang on the cave with your fists and kick at it with all your might. You chip a stalagmite and the cave collapses, suffocating you. You're dead.

THE END

04. You travel for hours, trying to get out of the cave but the entrance isn't getting closer. Eventually, you find that the floor is wet and it's starting to shift and pull with your steps.

If you want to turn back and investigate the water sound, go to #09
If you want to investigate the floor go to #11

05. The lever isn't hard to find after you push your way through to the back of the cave, smashing your head a few times on the dark, unyeilding parts of the ceiling. It strangely looks more like a uvula than a lever but you're pretty sure this is it.

If you would like to pull the lever, go to #17
If you would like to investigate the area further, go to #08

06. Upon further poking and prodding, you find a pattern in the reaction of the fleshy wall: You poke it and it retracts. As you spend a good deal of your time fingering the wall, your eyes begin to adapt slightly to the darkness and you are now confronted with the visage of an old man, who appears to be stuck inside the wall. He looks up at you and begins to speak but instead of words coming out, he spews forth a rancid, bubbly mess that congeals on your feet and begins to burn your shoes. They are starting to smoke.

If you want to take your shoes off, go to #10
If you want to ignore the smoke and scream at the old man for puking on your shoes, go to #16

07. Someone is shouting about a hyperspacial lever, if only you can find it. It's in the very back of the cave, they say.

If you wish to find the lever, go to #05
If you just want to leave this freaking cave, go to #12

08. After 20 minutes of feeling up the lever, your eyes adjust to the darkness of the cave. The lever has an engraving on a plaque nearby, which suggest that you should step to the right before pulling the lever.

If you would like to step to the right before pulling the lever, go to #18
If you would like to step to the left before pulling the lever, go to #13
If you don't need no stinkin warning and just want to pull the lever anyway, go to #17

09. The cave is getting darker as you move away from the entrance but you manage to find your way by bumbling around, grabbing at the stalactite-laden ceiling and oddly protruding walls. Part of the wall feels sticky and seems to move away when you touch it. You can ignore this creepy fact and continue looking for the stream or you can investigate and see what this thing is.

If you want to investigate, visit #06
If you wish to keep going and randomly bumble into more of these fleshy, reactive wall sores visit #02

10. It's too late, the acid has melted through and you are now sinking into the ground of the cave, footless and screaming in agony. Within seconds, you pass out from the pain and several hours later, you die.

THE END

11. As you investigate the floor, you find that it's moving like a tongue, the stalagmites and stalagtites begin to resemble teeth as you caress them.

If you would like to attack the cave, go to #03
If you would like to walk deeper into the back of the cave, at the risk of being swallowed up by whatever this thing is, go to #09

12. You meander through the cave, grasping onto whatever leverage you can manage to stumble into, always using the morning sunlight as a beacon for your escape. Sadly, after several minutes, you notice that the sunlit hole doesn't seem to be getting any larger as you approach it.

If you wish to continue walking toward it, go to #04
If you wish to turn back and go after the sound of the stream instead, go to #09

13. You step to the left and pull the lever. Before you get the lever all the way pulled, the cave has shifted just enough to rip your arm off and embed a stalagmite in your chest. You are dead. Next time follow instructions.

THE END

14. You learn the following:
A rutabaga, better know as "Swede" is a root, derived from the savage cross-special breeding of the cabbage and the turnip. The name rutabaga is derived from the Swedish, rotabagge, literally translated as "root yam". Other than this, the voice insists that you must eat your rotabagge to retain sanity. Then the voice babbles about robotic space fish and you lose focus of the voice somewhere around, "And the fish shall smite thee..."

Go to #20

15. The moaning gets louder until you can't even think from the deafening sound of the walls. It's not just moaning you hear but a few words, "pleeeze halp... daemon fractalpus...." or some such nonsense.

If you would like chicken out and head back to the cave entrance, go to #12
If you would like to speak to the invisible voices, go to #19

16. You begin to scream at the old man but you start to smell your feet burning.

Go to #10

17. You pull the lever with reckless abandon and the cave rumbles as it turns inside out. The masses of people, once trapped in the cave walls, half in hyperspace and half in 3-dimensional space, are now screaming for joy at having been saved. Unfortunately, you were decapitated by a stalagtite as the cave shifted. Your body was never found.

THE END

18. You step to the right and pull the lever. The cave seems to revolve around you, turning inside-out. The people who were once trapped within the walls of the cave, stuck with parts of their bodies embedded in hyperspace, all join to cheer your name and celebrate you as a hero. You get laid later tonight.

THE END

19. After several lame attempts to coax sensible speech patterns out of the voices with phrases like, "excuse me..." and "um, can you all please quiet down and speak once at a time?", you give up and just listen. After several minutes, you find that you've collected the following bits of information:

• There are people trapped in the walls.
• There is something about shifting the cave in space but you can't make out the finer points.
• Someone keeps screaming something else about rutabagas, which he seems to think is the most important bit of information you need to know.

If you would like to know more about rutabagas, go to #14
If you would like to learn more about shifting the cave in space, go to #07

20. The cave dissolves and a mysterious space-fish appears to smite you. Your plees of innocence have no affect on the gummy lipped demigod. Having become smitten with the fish, you spend the rest of your life in the cave, learning how to yell gibberish and invoke the smiting of the fish on other hapless travelers. You die of old age as a wrecked and misserable hermit.

THE END

What I Remember

I remember standing on the shore of the Pacific as the seagulls came in, cawing their return to land. The sun is not just setting but shooting out into the distance, fading back into the galaxy, the sky darkening with it's retreat. Behind the sun, on the other side, there is a shadow, the shadow of the sun, a swirling, smokey vortex, resting in space, pulsing with the absence of heat and fire. They lived their, or so they said. These people who visited from the future and who claimed to live in space, just behind the sun, in the shadow of the sun.

I see them there, just floating in the sky, on the rim of a black hole, the shadow of the sun. No need for spacesuits in their symbiotic harmony with space. I wonder what they give back. It doesn't keep me up at night, the wondering. We make it there, or they did. Someone did. Some of us evolved into a space-faring race and decided we liked it enough to become a part of it. They must not need oxygen or water out there--just light, just heat, just a little bit of sun dappled sky to sooth their future human minds, so full of answers, so full of our stories as some distant mythos.

The history books are full of lies. This I know for certain, as I have seen history become written and written as it didn't quite happen. Whatever they think of us, they must believe we are capable of such lies. Do they still write history books there in their time? I wonder if it's all just written in the stars, or maybe just in their collective mind, never to be forgotten as the collective never dies. These thoughts don't keep me awake at night. There's too much else to be thought to keep me awake, staring at that sky, waiting for the sun to return from wherever it faded out to in such a hurry, grasping at the icy air for the few remaining molecules of nitrogen and oxygen. It must be so suddenly warm wherever it landed. I wonder if it melted Europa as it passed, briefly awakening the Gods of Athens. Perhaps it ate up Pluto, ending it's sad desire to be so great as a planet, now just a morsel to feed the fire.

But these thoughts do not keep me up at night.

100 Word Challenge: Tragic

There is nothing so tragic as hopeless resignation. The world will spin until it stops. The sun will burn until it goes out. The human race will survive. It will always survive.
If it means singing in the acid rain, watching the moon fade into the sun, jump skipping to Mars and off to the next planet before we sink into the galactic funnel. Even if it means becoming the tech-memes, replicating genes, splitting neurons to copy our intellect, condensing our wisdom into tiny bottles made of nano-webbing and lab-grown DNA.
There is nothing so ecstatic as saying "Fuck you" to death.

100 Word Challenge via Velvet Verbosity

Wordless Wednesday: Who Me?!

Still Sick

I'm done with being sick.

No, really. Sick: I am done with you being.

Fie on't. And fie on your manxy woes.
Down with your nostril deamons and lyranx banshees. Call off your wolf cough, or Darwin as my witness, I shall evolve to destroy you.
Perhaps I'll sleep. To sleep, purchance to kick your viral ass.
Aye, there's the rub.

Al Gore's New Thinking on the Climate Crisis

From TED: Al Gore's latest TED Talk

The peak fishing time lapse map of the earth is creepier than the before and current of the north pole.

Not to totally change the subject and get you all self-obsessed but here's another creepy time lapse map:
CDC Obesity in the US from 1985-2007
Here's the final output:

Exploits of Ninja and Child: Recovery from the Plague of Man

Continuing our Saga from where we left off:

Outside the Fuji Happy Shack®, the night is bitter-sweet. A plague of savages, wrestling with the urge to procreate and vomit all at once, passively twitch, slow reaction time, moaning at each other in low tones, nearly inaudible, only visible in that fleeting brush of light that swerves by as you shake your head. It's all the same. Spunk and vomit. Nothing left of these streets but organic matter. The walls are dripping with living tissue. It's not human. We'll, maybe it is a little. There's a little DNA of everything mixed into these streets.

Ninja squeezes tight against his chest. Code Name Alice is sleeping, wrapped in another world--her vaccinations incomplete, only protecting her from known diseases. The streets are full of the unknown, the undiscovered, things that perhaps were once known and cured but that evolved beyond treatment. This pestilence, this bubonic biomass, it waits for nothing. Time is only useful in measuring the speed of it's growth, the countdown to our demise.

Stepping into a nearby Cinetech, the world of flesh fades out. Phosphorescent blue comes into view, a light of a nearby star, no... a planet, earthly, ripe, luscious, void of spunk and vomit. Soon to be populated by our dreams.

"Oy! You buyin' or just breathin'? Either way, you gotta pay. This air here isn't cheap. You think this stuff grows on trees..." The attendant pauses and looks sheepish then mutters, "...still?"

Ninja tosses the man a coin and moves closer to the holographic display. The planet zooms closer and a wave of crisp air smooths over his face. The hologram is breathing too. The dream is alive with so much use. You give enough thought to something and it starts to take those thoughts and piece them together, mashing them up in a new neural-network, using the thoughts of others who paid their own piece of mind. This dream to start anew is breathing it's own verse, singing it's own tune, striking a pose in front of the masses as if to say, "Dream on; feed me; I need to be true."

Stretching out a hand, Ninja joins the other patrons in feeling the dream from the inside, caressing the rim of it and stepping in, giving all to the light.

The hologram inhales, expanding to fill the Cinetech dome, consuming the dreamers within.

Code Name Alice: All Smiles

Code Name Alice with Her Mom and Dad

Wordless Wednesday: Extreme Piano

Code Name Alice, Flattening Daddy's Morrissey Hair

Code Name Alice on Her Daddy's Shoulders

Ninja and Child: Laughing