Bustr Bensn

There’s no point in customizing your Tumblr theme, right?  It’s all about the Dashboard, right?

It looks like Tumblr has added “replies” which only works for people who the author follows.  And only from the Dashboard.  The universe has exploded!  The real question: why did they add this now, after being against it for so long?

UPDATE: Yes, Josh, they appear without needing approval, but strangely, I can’t reply to my own posts and must therefore update it this way.  I also don’t get a notification that a reply has been made, but the Dashboard has a little notice in the stream.

In that manner Phoebe slid under the radar for the next million years (bouncing off a small rock at the 15% mark, effectively increasing her odds of hitting Earth through accidental course correction) until finally being spotted by recreational astronomers who happened to be using a grid of ridiculously complex computers to comb immense expanses of black for subtle signs of white. Their hope: to find a new white speck (it didn’’t matter if it was a rock, planet, star, or alien space ship…—all would do) that would carry their collective name into the history books and lead to better funding and recognition from a world government that had long since ceased to care about the cosmic attribution of its own luck, skill, and success, much less its destruction.

There were no physical markers in Phoebe’’s path to help us recall the moment when the hundreds of small tribes began forming in several parts of the world simultaneously. These new, innovative, organizations were successfully pulling uninterested and unfriendly savages together like condensing droplets of water into increasingly complex and dependant relationships. In the Mediterranean, of course, they were gaining a strong hold, but this was also happening in China, parts of Africa and Asia like Cyrania Minor, Doljchoyvec Valley, Rimtalec Nook, etc, and the idea of hunting and gathering became the biggest idea to grip the world since organized violence (though that was still pretty popular as well, and would only be trumped by organized war in a few hundred thousand years). These people began to understand the universe they lived in, mapping patterns in the sky with the success of their tribes, relationships, and personal destinies. Trial and error led to complex algorithms involving the placement of the sun and the stars, which, within a certain margin of error, could pinpoint the causes of events that had devastated them, or which led them to times of incredible plenty. Through pictorial and verbal communication, this information had a higher chance of survival over time by being stored outside of the human brain: on walls, tablets, and crypts, and eventually books, audiocassettes, and DVDs.

Phoebe wobbled on.

Comets like Phoebe travel invisibly for the majority of their parabolic journeys.  —Under normal circumstances they emit no light and reflect only a negligible fraction back. They zig and zag through empty space, almost never hitting one another, though occasionally coming within a few million miles of each other, slightly bending each others’ paths, or slowly spiraling into the gravity of a distant star or large planet. These occasional scenes of drama, however, are often separated by millions of years of the most inane, uneventful, expanses of time ever experience by man, rock, or machine. Only when they get much closer to one of these heat-giving stars (we’’ll skip there soon) do they don their bright caps and tails, filling entire solar systems with their dazzling and ominous light, sputtering magnificent nonsense for all who care to hear.

A hundred thousand years out Phoebe was about .005% of the way to Earth, still spinning and still crawling. Still, not a single thought had crossed her icy mind. In the meantime, on Earth, scavengers (basically traditional businessmen and business women except without their ironed and tucked fashion sense——though otherwise mentally and physically identical) have continued to build tools (which they have been doing for a million years already), play with fire, establish status and power, and, most recently, have devised clever ways to quickly transport food, water, and news between families at all-time low costs. Though most families hunted and protected only themselves, a small minority were beginning to form cross-familial impromptu groups in order to perform some mutually-beneficial tasks such as catching rabbits in nets and sharing food with neighbors during times of abundance. Though they didn’’t speak, they acted on a simple game strategy“: the best place to store extra food is in the stomachs of your neighbors.” One of Larry Ludwig’’s extremely distant relatives looked into the stars and equated the movement of a certain bright star during a certain predictable cycle with bad luck. Instead of catching rabbits on the east side of the forest, today, he decided it would be better to catch rabbits on the west side of the forest for a while. Just to be safe. And his judgment paid off——rabbits immediately came running into his team’’s nets for the next several weeks. He became team leader, awash in tribal power for a few years, and later died at the age of eighteen having contributed to the births of four sons and five daughters.

At about the same velocity that Larry Ludwig would walk across town carrying a computer in a grocery bag 1.5 million years later, on a planet 9.3 billion miles away, an ageless, nameless, mass of ice and dust drifted from the outer edge of a cloud of millions upon millions of similarly ageless, nameless, masses of ice. It was pulled by a force it could barely feel for a reason it didn’’t know. About eighty kilometers in diameter, roughly pear-shaped, spinning like a fat ballerina in slow motion (one full rotation every three years), our dirty snowball (we’ll call her Phoebe for the moment), Phoebe, slid awkwardly through the vacuum of space without reason, yet with a brash undeniable confidence unmatched by any other interplanetary object within a dozen light years. The chances of Phoebe colliding with Earth (for she was headed in that general direction, give or take a few degrees) was about one in a hundred trillion (100,000,000,000,000). These odds, actually, were relatively good. For example, the type of person who can be easily impressed by overcoming unlikely odds should be more amazed, statistically-speaking, to later see our protagonist Larry Ludwig rack up twenty-nine consecutive Rock Paper Scissors victories against a superior opponent (there weren’’t even any draws). In a universe where trillions upon trillions of things were happening every second, it was only common sense to expect that extraordinary and rare events would occur every day. There were trillions upon trillions of comets like Phoebe out there, most of them sitting in dormant clouds for millennia on end until being given miniscule nudges in random directions. Et voila, our antagonist!

Tumblr seems to be having some problems in Chrome browser.  Getting a lot of “aww, snap!” messages.  Which are pretty funny.  But also annoying.  Anyone else getting this, or know the cause of this?

In the far distant past, or the far distant future—it hardly matters which, because the Great Curve of Time sends things ‘round to us either way—there lived a group of Giants: dull, oafish, petty and slow Giants.

These Giants lived for a very long time, perhaps forever. None of them were really sure, since none of them had yet died. They certainly lived for a very long time though, at least billions of years.

And they lived in the same place, with the same other Giants, with nothing to do but eat plums and chew the gently hallucinogenic Yellow Crumb Flower. Their minds having been so long around each other, and so long addled in just the same Yellow Crumb Flowery-way, fuse together and together dream a Great Hallucination.

Over a few billion years one’s imagination has a chance to fully mature, even if one is a small-brained Giant. It grows powerful, rich and fecund. And these Giants had some fertile imaginations indeed.

At the intersections of the Giants’ minds, whole new lives spring forth, in miniature. Those born in these places go on to inhabit and develop in the Giants’ shared dream space, freely moving from one Giant’s brain to another. They grow and multiply, becoming as quick and clever as the Giants are sluggish and foolish.

Living their lives In the Minds of Giants, our heroes jump from landscapes of memory and fear to panoramas of hope and fancy. They evolve and adapt, learning as they go. Gradually their collective action throughout the mental multiverse comes to effect the actions of the Giants themselves.

And so a strange causal loop develops, where what the Giants do has an effect on our wee protagonists, while they in turn effect the choices of the Giants. //// Can’t finish! Somehow need to add in that the Giants are also petty and always causing problems for one another and also need a name for ‘our heroes’ and say that you can play them. May need to change voice to do that. Help!

From The back story on Glitch’s back stories

I actually prefer this unfinished version better than the final version, if only for its to-the-pointedness and amazing ending.

I like this feature of recommending your friends to be included in the Directory.  I wish they were public.  So here’s my public version.

Last week I nominated Rick Webb.

This week I nominated Ted Roden.

I like them both because they offer frequent unpredictable, slightly at odds with the status-quo, observations about things that I never would have thought of myself but with which I always agree.

Are there really two lives?  The one we’re living and the one we want to live?  With our subconscious Lizard Brain(tm) in the way? I feel like I’ve overcome that little problem.  Anyone else?