Cool article that caught my eye recently on friendship. Interesting how such relationships haven’t changed all that much over thousands of years.
Pork Nom Nom – Photo Diary 2023-04-25
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“Dying’s easy… Living’s hard.”
“Memory” Vorkosigan Saga #10 – Lois McMaster Bujold
Brisk Walk – Photo Diary 2022-10-04
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OCC – Photo Diary 2022-10-03
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First Snow – Photo Diary 2022-10-02
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poem? © Jeffrey Beaty
March 28, 2022 — 3 AM
I felt the need to write this… thing. Technically not a poem. I question whether it can even be classified free verse. But the act of pulling it out of me resulted in a weird combination of pseudo meter and pseudo structured lines, mixed with long run-on bits of normal prose. Anyway, it had that feeling I occasionally get when I find myself turning poetic whether or not the results qualify as that — an intense need to express something that I can’t quite communicate even to myself. I cropped, simplified, reordered and structured a little making it at least a little more poetic, in form if not fact, until it felt at least in part like what I needed to say.
2nd in a series of posts inspired by Elite Dangerous, a space video-game that I’ve been playing; full of images, cool astronomy & science facts, and associated sci-fi & pop culture trivia.
Pollux is 34 lightyears from Sol, and the closest giant star to our sun. Pollux is 18 ly from Stop 1 on our tour, it’s “twin” Castor. Pollux is the 18th brightest star as seen from Earth (including the Sun) and the brightest star in constellation Gemini. Pollux is an orange-hued “evolved giant” star in a special spectral class, called Class KO-III. Earlier in its life it would have been a Class A (hot white or blue/white dwarf star), but Pollux has exhausted the hydrogen in its core, and expanded and cooled as a result. As such the star has moved off the line of main sequence or “adult” stars and entered it’s old age “giant” phase, and is estimated to be about 724 million years old. It is about two times the mass, and almost NINE times the radius of our Sun.
Continue reading Sol Region Sight-Seeing Tour #2 – Pollux
The Tour? Why that’s a geeky idea I had to dig up all the fact and fiction about the stars around and including our Sun, known as Sol in science and science fiction. Ostensibly, as a bit of a learning experience while I go about the playing a video-game.
You see, I’ve been playing a “space flight simulator” video game I really love called Elite Dangerous that has excited my long interest in Astronomy. The game is set in the future where humanity has moved out to begin to settle and explore our galaxy. As such the game includes a 1 to 1 online mock-up of our Milky Way Galaxy with as much as we know to be true added to it, and fairly realistic algorithms for what we don’t know, and a lot of fictional future-history and lore added to give it all some drama, and all kinds of different ways to “play” depending on your interests. From exploration, pvp & pve combat, mining, commodity trading, power play politics, passenger liner business, bounty hunting, and much more.
I wanted to explore some of the famous stars we know in our real night skies.
Another short bit of fiction that sprung from a writing workshop’s prompt. This writing prompt was simply to write a 500-word story that begins: “And then the wolves came.”
For whatever reason I immediately wanted the word “wolves” to become an acronym. I’ve been trying to vent a lot of frustration and downright ill feeling towards radical extremism, and the incredibly polarized world in which we have come to live when it comes to politics, opinion, and every extreme cause you can imagine; all refusing to let go of history, to live and let live, and instead turning everything into a witch hunt, public shaming campaign intent on destroying the “other” guy (whoever that may be) for simply having different opinions, political leanings, sex, gender, race, whatever. Lot of it recently has been a lot of back spin. Hey, you’re older than 40, male and white? Clearly you’re the devil. 🙄
I managed to keep much of what I had envisioned out of the story, (easy to do when they are this short). So a lot of the current-event specifics I intended to poke some jabs at never made it in. Which I guess keeps this from becoming out-dated. Only the core feelings remain. Maybe that’s better. Regardless, I REALLY like the result.
Download Then the W.O.L.V.E.S. Came
42kb Adobe PDF, 2 pages, about 500 words.
