Had one of those awesome dreams out of the blue again last night where really big stuff happens and it's as good as any rockin' scifi movie I've ever seen in my life. This one was about a small group of people working to change an event in history that would ultimately lead to the misery and near demise of the human race and devastation around the planet- the space race.
I'm a huge space race fan, and I'm all for it. There is a LOT of political history behind the space race, and even more mysterious hoopla about hidden agendas. If you don't have a clue, bless your heart, you're still innocent, but if you have read Richard Hoagland's book (or anything else), feel free to jump in and yap your opinions.
Anyway, along with rocket science comes a lot more science and political motivation, and most of us have seen tv shows about the end of humanity by now. There is always the possibility that someone will get their hands on way too much technoweenie stuff and blow us all up for whatever reason they deem proper. Well, in my dream, something REALLY bad was happening, had happened, and more bad was going to happen. All times are now, to paraphrase Einstein, and I personally believe the future can and does affect the past in ways we don't yet fathom.
(Please keep in mind I generally avoid time travel movies because I pick them to death, always find ridiculous flaws, except I still watch everything Trek and I still love the Back to the Future trilogy, so if I'm saying anything familiar, it didn't come from a movie.)
The idea for this group was to unravel some of the scientific developments with sabotage so that the big space stuff couldn't happen on track, because one nasty side effect of the space race was horrible economic imbalance and world war, resulting in such devastation that our society and even nature became permanently crippled in ways that didn't justify the scientific gain. I was part of this group in the dream. Our first attempt failed, so we were trying again, but I realized minutes before we were to execute the plan that it, too, would fail, *and* wipe out our ability to keep attempting time change, so I spontaneously jumped into an alt plan without time to tell the others, and I had to stay ahead of them stopping me while doing everything correctly at top speed by myself to make the change happen.
You guys never see all the books I DON'T write. People have been begging me for years to WRITE BOOKS. If I stopped and wrote a book every time I had a cool dream, I wouldn't ever come up for air. But back to what happened!
I was successful. I wound up back in the past just a week after the first change our group attempted. A little boy ran by me who would have been dead, because I witnessed his death the week before last time. I called out, "How's your day going, ___?" (I've already forgotten his name.) He was a little grumpy, but clearly already on a different path, along with his family and neighborhood. I'm not clear on what happened, you know how dreams are, or maybe that was my memory fading from changing history. Whatever. I just knew it had worked.
If you were given the chance to change human history for the better, even if it meant crippling the space race, would you do it? And given some thoughts I've already had in past time travel discussions, could that have already happened? (Think about this, doesn't it seem like the whole space race thing has been limping along...?) If time travel is a real thing, then it's been all around us this whole time. There is no one day it's not here and another day it is, because once you cross a timeline, all the days in between are part of the time travel, even if they are seemingly unaffected.
I have no actual beliefs yay or nay, besides that the world we live in is most likely very different from how we perceive it, but it's fun to run into stuff like this and watch other people yap about it.
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The Yakov Smirnoff Theater in Branson is only a few miles up the road from us. In all the time I've lived around here I have never stepped foot inside, although we did sit at the next table from him at a Chuck E Cheese when our girls and his first kid were little, and my daughter took pictures of him and his family at the Tintype shop in Silver Dollar City in Branson a few years later. And last year he left Branson for Hollywood, but you can still win dinner with him in Branson this coming fall, for those who might have caught @TonySolo tweeting me to go see him.
But as we were headed out to the Branson airport a couple weeks ago, we were surprised to discover that the National Tiger Sanctuary is practically in our back yard. O_O You know those stories about escaped animals from zoos? Yeah, we're not thrilled about the possibility of news announcements about loose tigers in the Busiek Forest. They have a wide range in the wild and one tiger can easily cover 10 miles. Tiger - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia There was a manhunt near here last fall and they never caught the guy, I doubt they find a tiger in the rugged Ozark Mountains once it's gotten loose. Might get interesting, being's how I live on the edge of 'Mirkwood'. Anyhoo, we drove by the 'ranch', what a cute little mailbox they've got! RAWR!
You know you're back in Branson when you have a fish pond in the middle of the airport. I love this tiny little airport, it mimics flying into dangerously rugged backwater 3rd world next to a posh golf resort.
And we just beat this storm in. Hufda!
We traveled by car a LOT when I was growing up, more like literally lived in the car for 17 hours straight going to see my gramma when Dad got vacation. My dad slipped through the 'highway closed' barriers in the dead of winter and drove Wolf Creek Pass with a station wagon full of terrorized kids, equally zooming with ease through downtown Oklahoma City and Phoenix. I've been gripped with fear on cliffs in the Painted Desert, over ancient skeletons at Chaco Canyon, on rickety ladders at Cliff Dwellings, deep in the dark bowels of Marvel Cave, but nothing beats the thrill of driving through a concrete jungle doing 70+ mph across multiple lanes and hoping you don't go flying off a beltway into a tangle of beautiful superstructures. Scott says he can't wait till cars can fly... You know that scene in Attack of the Clones where Anakin is leaping through traffic on Alderaan? Yeah, THAT.
Houston was awesome. Heard it's going to take over Chicago's rank as 3rd largest city in America. Gonna miss it.
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It's official, I've been listed as a SnarkAlec by @TonySolo himself this week. Here are a few links that are fun to check out.
Snarkalecs | Wix.com
SnarkAlecs on Google
http://www.youtube.com/user/SnarkAlecRadio/videos
I shall celebrate with my fave scifi parody fanvid.
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I met the most famousest of Hobbits yesterday. The pic kinda sux because we're all tired, just shut your eyes and don't look at it.
That is Dan (yes, "Theologian's Cafe" Dan), at the heart and core of the Xanga Relaunch team (along with Joel Manzer- edlives on Twitter & Autisable, and others) and yours truly. What I was told yesterday is that the Xanga move will be seamless, and about the only difference will be that bloggers will need to pay to continue using the moved blogs after the move. I have no problemo with that, I already pay for perks. My main concerns are about main links being broken and losing our search engine rankings, although that is all fixable and something I can handle on my own if need be.
Beyond that, however, it can still all go *poof* if community interest wanes and financial obligations really can't be met over the next year ~after~ the move, so all Xanga bloggers are being offered free archive downloading before the move on July 15th. The core relaunch team (not paid by Xanga) is working on a different style of internet marketing, and the Xanga Team (who have essentially been working for free) is letting them do it, huzzah!
This isn't much different from an employee owned grocery store. When people want to retain the thing that has shaped their lives, they pitch in and keep it alive themselves.
Joel runs an authorized Xanga store. While there is barely any revenue made on these products, at least they are still available for nostalgia. If Xanga does wind up going *poof*, these items will become retro and hard (if not impossible) to find. Considering that Xanga has been around for 14 years from the age of the dinos (before facebook!) and was once in the top 100 social media sites worldwide before the webs asploded with billion dollar blog babies and Google contracts, those of us hard core Xanga junkies who have surfed this wave practically from the beginning are hellbent on making it rad retro for as long as possible. (I once bought a 'spacebook' t-shirt, I LOVE stuff like that.)
The Xanga blogging community is *different*, mostly people who take community blogging (actual writing) very seriously, and Xanga created the perfect atmosphere for that, where other sites might feel more like drive-by blurbing and street cruising, if not outright campy family reunions and teen hangouts. If you've missed the ride, there's no help for you. If you were a part of Xanga and remember Dan's Save the Boobs campaigns, the trolls, Xanga Queens, and "you might be a xangan if", you seriously need to grab a t-shirt from the link way up there.
In the meantime- Xanga: The Movie
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For lurkers out there pounding my Lexx blog harder than ever wondering what's going to happen to it, here is the latest from the Xanga Team, as answered to Joel Manzer of the Autisable Xanga network-
From http://edlives.xanga.com/773700664/q...eam---round-1/
"Me: Let's say we reach the $60,000 - and you guys get everything set up - and people who didn't contribute would like to now upload their archived content (cause they like what they see)- would there be a way to easily do that?
Xangateam (marc): If we reach the fundraiser goal and you're a current premium member, we will definitely convert your site over. So it should be seamless for you.
If we do reach the goal but you're not a current premium members, you'd have to manually import your site. The current archives are pretty raw data files focused on helping you preserve your data. It'd be a pretty manual process getting that data into a wordpress account, but it's definitely possible."
So at present it looks like my personal headache over this move would only involve checking for and redirecting broken internal links and reestablishing new main blog links with search engines. It's probably a good thing I'm on vacation and have the laptop packed up most of the time so I'm not hovering obsessively over this. Anyone who has ever constructed a fan based website heavily linked to other social media can probably understand the angst I'm fielding the last few days. Believe it or not, I'm doing a lot of laughing through this. Like last night, I stomped everyone at Scrabble. Scott voluntarily wore the loser tile.
And this has been keeping us pretty busy.
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Don't usually make a big deal of vacation pix, but here are a couple I was thrilled to get.
Lazy morning in the hotel room, watching progress on the Xanga relaunch and snacking on Frosted Mini-Wheats. Torch downloading is instantaneous here, awesome distraction.
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This is where a surprise challenge brings out the best in a person, right? Like on Iron Chef America when the Chairman suddenly announces a special request in the middle of a hot celebrity chef cookoff countdown in Kitchen Stadium.
Xanga (my favorite blog host and where I keep my Lexx blog) announced a couple of days ago that it will either be folding or merge-relocating after July 15th (the latter looking highly doubtful). Users are already wailing to the unlistening heavens that the archive download option isn't working. Xanga is descending like a flaming Hindenberg amongst virtual food fights, blind believers bravely donating membership pledges in desperate attempts to kickstart, and thousands already abandoning and bailing with little "WordPress" and "LiveJournal" parachutes.
I've been with Xanga since 2004. My personal blog accidentally morphed into a Lexx fan blog and then shot to world fame when a rival fan evil schemed a plot to create a train wreck of me for morbidly curious onlookers (I still thank her for that), rocking Lexx fans worldwide as our weird chesslike forum jousting ricocheted out of control at MegaCon in Orlando in 2007, wherein Florida State Police became involved. I took PR advice and simply stopped responding to the ridiculous drunken escapades (which are still viewable online to this day), but I will say this- I still have in my private Xanga blogs a whole lot of stuff about what really went down privately, on ALL sides. And I will say the 'bad guy' was neither me nor her, but someone very surprising. In the end, I chose to side WITH THE FANS and declined to press charges, completely saving my arch enemy's personal identification from becoming public information (that's a lot of power to have in one's hands...). Seriously, to me that was a moral conundrum that could only be solved by taking the bullet, because I knew what we were on the cusp of being able to do if that had happened- I created a triangle out of a 2-sided problem and got axed on both sides, because fandom is about THE FANS. I made a choice that day that not only branded me public defamation that I've quietly lived with for 6 years now (still makes me pretty famous ), but also apparently has kept lurkers watching everything I do all this time. I cannot express the warm fuzzies I get when I see those continual weekly checkins on my trackers from all over the world going straight to Lexx.
So it's going to be a really big deal that my Lexx blog, freshly come out from underground for so long, is now going to have to very publicly MOVE. It's a *huge* deal, actually. Even barely getting the ball rolling I already have a solid start on what promises to become the biggest Lexx film study in internet history, already with nearly 1000 screen grabs in paid public hosting and I'm barely halfway into the first movie. This is all not for profit, a media study on a personal blog, and I've already spent over $300 out of pocket this year building it. This is hobby money that I don't expect to get back. Thanks to a medical condition, I cannot get out in the sun for any length of time without severe repercussions, among other things, so I spend a great deal of time entertaining myself by creating what I'd personally like to be able to find online for one of my favorite scifi shows, and it's just not out there (yet). At any rate, I've got 6 weeks to salvage and move reams of manually written html before it's gone forever.
In 2006 I was offered free hosting with the same people who host William Shatner's official blog (don't know if he's still got that same hosting). I turned it down. At the time I was afraid I would lose my autonomy. If I'd taken the offer, my Lexx stuff would never have disappeared and would be absolutely huge by now. Do I regret this? You bet. This starting over from scratch stuff is a lot of work, but I feel like I'm at least rising to the challenges I'm setting for myself.
The next 6 weeks for me are going to be a little hairy because I'm such a workaholic that I've already got a ton of stuff to move (and so much more besides Lexx, since I've been blogging with Xanga for 9 years now- can anyone say book material?). But since I was already headed in this direction, this outside force pushing me will only make me that much more polished. This is where having a little grit comes in handy.
I love you guys. My twitter elates me growing so fast like that, myke is so kind allowing me to run free on his forum and blog site here, and it's thrilling learning to play on the big kid playground, you know? This first year has been so much more overwhelmingly successful than I ever dreamed, I can only imagine the heights I can soar to by this time next year having fun and doing cool stuff on the webs.
This is now a genuine working vacation (except I can't claim it on taxes, haha). I'm going to start it off RIGHT and go see Star Trek Into Darkness in 3D this evening. BOOYA!
Last edited by Pinky; 06-01-2013, 09:01 PM.
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I'm in a gorgeous LaQuinta Inn this week, lotta perks, best hotel bed I've ever slept in, get pix of the awesome fish tanks later. Scott is downstairs loading up his breakfast while I cook my eggs here in the room. You can see my allergy bracelets there, alas. But I was wise and sent my cute little Jetsons style egg poacher ahead in a box!
Took a LOT to get me back onto a plane after the crazy flights I've been on over a couple of mountain ranges some years ago, but there's a lot of fuss being made over this little guy...
Grampa Scott was rewarded for coming with homemade coconut cream pie! Look, meringue! And it's prettier than mine!!!! (She actually followed my meringue recipe for Stargate Pie, crack me up.)
Gonna prowl a few streets today, hold a baby a lot, sift out some plans, and hopefully be slinging out some cool stuff from the Gulf area. Something about penguins.
I canNOT wait to see this!
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Jammin' out real quick while my wallpaper scrolls through the cool stuff.
Like night and day, only a few days ago it was super low tech in wheat fields and dusty roads, in a couple more days it will be Houston metro flying the beltway and skimming through multiple feeds on multiple devices. Can real life get any more scifi?
Watched "Star Trek: Secrets of the Universe" on H2 this week (here is the video). I've spent most of my life feeling so excited about living on the cusp of discovery. We're in a real breakthrough age of mankind, and we either surge forward or collapse back, but either way this kind of human history doesn't come around very often.
Gotta stay focused on packing again. Jam with me.
And if you need more tech meth for your Zachary mood, this is the cutest vid I've ever seen. (I think I just invented the phrase "tech meth", I'm not finding it in searches. Feel free to use it. Word.) Petsami Presents: "Dog Eat Dog" starring Zachary Quinto
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Nerds around the globe get their geek on nearly every weekend. I watched comiccon hashtags through my twitter feed from London, Houston, and Phoenix while I prowled around America's breadbasket on 1X last weekend. I have a 4G plan, but was lucky to pull 3G as long as I stayed within a mile radius of the only hotel for miles, and beyond that, one tweet in particular took 2 hours to swim its way to a satellite and bounce back. What made this pic for me was that is the same science reader I had in the third grade in New Mexico.
I ditched the reunion for awhile to cruise the teeny streets around Goessel. All the nerds around Marion County are super geeks when it comes to Turkey Red Wheat and how it came here, but probably the coolest thing about it is America's bread basket is grown by mankind's most successful, albeit most subtle rebellion to date. These brainiacs not only found a way to escape wars for centuries, but wound up feeding everyone around them along the way. This hardcore Mennonite group still retains cultural values going back centuries while integrating into modern society with education and jobs all over the United States and beyond.
From Grains - King Arthur Flour
Ok, enough with the history lesson (I'm a foodie, wonder where I get that from...) and on to the good stuff. I won't deluge you with pix from what I dubbed the 'Amish commicon', but you might be interested to know that John Denver is supposed to be in my extended family tree somehow (beyond the strictly limited family reunion I attended), and they sell his stuff at the Mennonite Heritage and Agricultural Museum in Goessel.
At every good con is a Batmobile and a Delorean...
And of course, the fans. Here is 38 seconds of my dad yapping away in the crowd.
For those of you wondering about cameras, that's mostly Amish who refuse to have pictures taken and/or published, but even so, about half the Mennonites in the room were against loading family genealogy info online because of rampant identity theft in today's high tech world. Pretty savvy bunch.
We headed home before the big tractor show, was told I missed some pretty good stuff. Well, they miss some pretty good stuff, too. http://youtu.be/yIQno79JSTk
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Earth geologic history fascinates me, so driving through the Flint Hills in Kansas the last couple of days was my cup of tea. The coolest thing I saw and didn't get a picture at the time was the Getty Refinery (as it was called in my dad's day) silhouetted against a somber dark cloudy slightly on the edge of orange sky across a somewhat forgotten not quite barren landscape of twisted shrub and ancient broken rocks thrusting up like they were strewn about the fields. It was so much like the 50's-60's depictions of alien worlds with their skinny spired constructions that I vowed to get a picture on the way back.
And near it was one of those big wind farms you see on tv with the super tall gigantic fan blades that take two tractor trailer rigs to haul. Sorry about the distance, you might have to get your nose up to the screen and squint a little.
Here is 14 seconds of the steady wind through that area. The grass moves like waves of water.
Also got 11 seconds of wind with the wind farm in the background, it's a little blurry. http://youtu.be/kRq66T6LzXA
The Missouri Ozarks is a bit perkier, felt good to get back.
I'll nerd out on the 'Amish comiccon' tomorrow, perhaps...
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This weekend already looks pretty huge O_O
There are 3 cons that I'm going to try to watch hashtags on- MCMExpo London, Phoenix Comicon, and Comicpalooza ΤΗτ Houston, @ Syfy will be airing part 1 of the big Merlin series finale Friday, I'm hoping to be doing a Stargate Atlantis twitter watch party that same night, AND I'll be in the middle of a family reunion! I can do this! I'm a MerLexxian! My challenge will be doing it all through a limited 4G plan and hotel wifi. *wheeeee*
(That and more cool pix in my original smashing fandoms blog post.)
I won't be doing #FF on twitter this week since I'll be on a highway hoarding my 4G for all of the above. And then next weekend I'll be on another trip hoarding it for other cons and Merlin again. I'll pick back up on that in the middle of June.
Uploaded on Jul 30, 2010 by BJsRealm (477 videos to date, if you'd like to check those out)
"At the San Diego Comic-Con Merlin Panel Colin was asked how the whole "You're the Voice" thing happened..."
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Family reunion in 4, 3, 2.... Playing musical cars, packing, for some reason it came to our attention that my passport is missing even though we're only driving to the next state. We're professionals, we ransacked the house *calmly*. Not a big deal right now, main thing is making sure the chickens are set up for water- here's a cute little 15 second vid if you wanna see them trying out the new 5 gallon waterer. http://youtu.be/opQFYcFxq1s
I'm taking my Stargate Atlantis discs with me for a twitter #SGAWT **WATCH PARTY** on Friday, hooray!!!! I'm aspie, I can't tell you how lovely it will be to have a cool excuse to duck out of the fray and back into a hotel room with my homies. I mean, so far it looks like we'll have one, if we don't, maybe I can duck out for a break anyway.
In the meantime, I'm doing all the usual, getting the bills done ahead, whittling the fridge contents down, counting how many pairs of undies I've got... Serious brain drain. I need a motivation vid!
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Being a scifi fan is the bomb, if the food you make looks weird, just name it after a tv show. Like I did with this Stargate Pie. I turned it into a meringue tutorial at http://grandfortuna.xanga.com/773325634/stargate-pie/
My brain is scattered getting ready for a couple of big trips, so amuse yourself with the latest viral video loaded just yesterday, "The History of YouTube by The Gregory Brothers (YouTube Comedy Week)"
If you don't know the Gregory Brothers, they zoomed into world fame with these autotune faves.
Songify This - Winning - a Song by Charlie Sheen
BED INTRUDER SONG!!! (now on iTunes)
See much more epic coolness in their channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/schmoyoho
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I am a HUGE Jack Bauer fan. When I heard Jack is coming back next year, I floated right up to my ceiling and stayed there the rest of the day.
Fox announces 2013-14 fall schedule, which includes return of Kiefer Sutherland's '24'
The parody accounts were priceless.
Renee Walker's Facebook Page! | B-Side Blog
Scott, who wouldn't be caught dead otherwise, bought a 'man purse' because of Jack Bauer.
A hot Jack Bauer fansite went up called Jack Bauer Facts
My favorite 'fact'- "If everyone listened to my instructions, it'd be called '12' "
(Ha, FOX is actually doing it now.)
I read every single Jack Bauer fact (now over 3600) and laughed my head off, but here is a shortcut link to the most popular.
The Best Jack Bauer Facts
Add a random Jack Bauer fact generator to your website!
Jack Bauer Random Fact Widget
A LOT of people blogged about Jack Bauer, like this one.
Today's Quiz: [Jack Bauer yell] WHO DO YOU WORK FOR!?
I even included Jack's picture in a survivalist post on my own blog.
survivalists- end of the world, 2012- mach II
Jack was such a big thing that other countries used him for commercials to help sell their products.
24h - Kiefer Sutherland (Japan Commercial 1)
24h - Kiefer Sutherland (Japan Commercial 2)
Jack Bauer on Citro?½n C4 Pallas Tv Comercial
Obsessive fans really did worry about this-
Kiefer Sutherland on Taking a Pee in "24"
Fans filmed their own episode parodies and wrote tribute songs.
"Hey There Jack Bauer"
"JACK BAUER'S DAY OFF: EPISODE 1"
"24 Jack Bauer DRIVE THRU spoof" (a little over played, but stayed in character)
It got really cute when Arrested Development got in on the parody trend.
Arrested Development "24" Spoof "Where's Marwan?"
These are my top two favorite fan tribute music vids-
"24 Jack Bauer Holding Out For A Hero"
"Jack's Greatest Hits (fun version)"
AND NOW.... Jack's back!!!!!!
Want to do a little reviewing? There are over 300 vids at
24 Series Videos and Promos
Can you top Kiefer Sutherland's score?
"Kiefer Sutherland Quizzed on 24"
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