The Fair Men are Thrown into the Ocean (TFMATITO)

Superman's greatest weakness (save for generic hostage-taking and simple recognition of him with glasses on) came from his own home, a piece of his own past to haunt him, the alien mineral, Kryptonite. These radioactive pieces of his home world somehow become comically (!!) abundant across the Earth, falling into the hands of evil genius and robotic genius alike. The idea is that it is supposed to be hard to come by, but they always seem to find their way back (often accidentally) to the comic's titular man-of-steel-who-is-hurt-by-this-one-thing.

It is a well-known piece of the mythology that Superman, the trusting guy that he is, entrusted Batman (Bruce WAYNE!) with a clod of the neon-green Superman-killing substance. He did this because of the fact that Superman has the fatalistic/narcissistic idea that one of the worst things that could happen to the world is that one of his many enemies could take over his super-mind and super-body and super-fuck a lot of stuff up.

This isn't an unfounded fear, of course. Brainiac, Toyman, Parasite, Lex effin' Luthor, Morgan la Fey, Darksied, Zod, the Ultra-Humanite, Gorilla Grodd, and a bunch of other guys always want to control his mind or steal his powers to knock over apparently uninhabited buildings into clouds of ash. He is a hero and a potential tool for the enslavement and/or destruction of mankind.

Batman sometimes has a knuckleduster made of Kryptonite, and even breaks his ban on guns on occasion to load it with a single Kryptonite bullet to stop his sometimes-trusted partner in justice. (Just a note: If Batman swears off guns and projectile weapons, the crutch of the violent and effective crime fighter, one can only assume he is not much of a marksman. So, in the moment when he needs to stop the crazed Kryptonian, he'll likely just shoot Jimmy Olson in the face.)

In light of the always-accumulating literary legitimacy of comic books or expensive comic books (called graphic novels), and the allusions that people seek out that may apply to their own lives in these brightly colored, exclamation-packed, paneled mirrors, I was curious about the ideas that relate to weaknesses, and actually giving it to a trusted friend.

Is it conceivable that one day you or I will become so contemptable to ourself that we would ask those that we love to destroy or maim us with our terrible secret weakness? What would a real life person's weakness be?

Bullets, blood loss, physical trauma, lack of oxygen, and ingested toxins aside, of course.

A stack of diaries most likely.

Scotch.

Exes.

What would be the situation that would call for this sort of tender attack? What parameters would you set for clearance for a loved one to destroy you?

Becoming a bigheaded asshole for an excess of 1.5 years.

Drunk driving (in the process of).

Dating a soul-killer for an excess of .5 years.

Being under the influence of mind-control nanites by malevolent persons unknown.

Let it be noted, that I'm not giving anyone any permission to destroy me here. These are just examples, and in no way represent the means by which and the conditions that my self-approved destruction would occur. Really.

Vox Haud Lego

I've been examining a bill of mine and it's online counterpart for a while, and I'm convinced that this is not going to end well at all. There has a been a small bit of pride in my belly about how my upbringing included near daily lessons in skepticism for anything in print and, later, anything written in any language. This did ruin a lot of contests in the back of Highlights for Kids Magazine, promises of Hovercrafts in the back of Boy's Life, and gift wrap selling schemes that public school throws at you (with a sweet stage show and a Super Nintendo!), but prevented me from being an overly gullible fuck.

This did, however, made me think that any offer, opportunity, method, or service is probably not real or is made out of some kind of rice paper. Hollow and insubstantial.

Letters go out, and nothing ever comes back.

It could be just a general lack of faith in the written word, but I wouldn't say that out loud. I'd write it, so it could be a whole lot of nothing. I know that the written word isn't insubstantial. If you'd ask me, I'd say it was a dumb question and you were a dumb person for suggesting such a thing. That doesn't stop the subcutaneous feeling that everything I read comes off as insincere, even if written by a friend, lover, or a prize-winning president of minds and hearts of hearts.

To clarify, this, for the most part, excludes books (save for self-help and life-instructional books) for the most part.

While this strange instinct (actually, aversion) has saved me a handful of times, I am recognizing that it is, and has been, kicking my life in the head. This mistrust of written words and the papers they are on really hurt when I was dealing with college applications, scholarships, job opportunities, or bills and documentation for services you never received and really don't want to deal with.

I'm sure this all just came from all those fan letters (and I did write a lot) and orders for novelties that never yielded a response when I was younger. I'm not bitter, I'm just really dumb. This is just one not particularly well thought out angle of revisionist self-history and introspection. That's what writing about yourself on the internet is about.

This just came to mind when I saw a pamphlet in an office and I made myself read it. I was sweating bullets for the meeting I was waiting for and also from biking in all kind of polypropolene and fleece while standing in the middle of an office lobby. I felt like a crazy person.

The pamphlet was on buying energy shares in windmills.

My mom is sculpting a lot of neat things again. Like this.

New Minneapolis : 2345!

Today I am taking care of business to ensure a future for my academic career.

This morning that means being scared out of my wits in a building that looks like an underground bunker for some terrible shadow government (Williamson Hall, home to the SCORPION DIRECTORATE), it's zero degrees outside, and I've got other people's medicine in my pocket. This morning I've been proved retarded by the Twin Cities Metro Transit System.

At least it was good to get closure on that.

An hour later, I'm less scared, in the sunlight, and discovering the power part of a powerbagel. The immediate future may be alright, but the far future is still questionable.

That is why I have been thinking of space megastructures. Massively impractical giant structures that live in space and do absurd things while looking rapturously awesome.

These are a few speculative space habitats coming from a few theorists to whom they owe their names. They revolve (!) around the idea that it is a good idea to place a large amount of people, flora, and fauna on orbital or interplanetary platforms than on preexisting surfaces like planets, planetoids, asteroids, and asterplanetoids. They may help in the preservation of the memory of Earth after any number of foreseeable/unforeseeable cataclysmic events, and may be plausible if there were magic money that made it practical to construct my childhood dreams in high orbit at this point in time.

First, the Bernal Sphere

The habitable area of this would be the central sphere, which would be about 500 meters in diameter, rotating at 1.9 RPM to produce normal earth gravity around the equator. A large central mirror would reflect sunlight into a large transparent window on one pole of the sphere, providing the interior with sunlight.

Looking inside, we can only imagine the terror and disorientation that these space people would endure upon first stepping onto this impossibly shaped world. Looking up to see the forests and people living on the opposite end, and a large portion of the sky being a reflected image of the Sun sitting in the Void's velvet pillow, staring at you brilliantly like a blood diamond that actually cost the lives of a lot of people you kind of knew, but only out of regrettable necessity.

You'd also throw up, which elicits an oddly delayed shock that your vomit, indeed, falls straight to your feet instead of sailing through the air.

Next, the O'Neill Cylinder

A these all use the same concept: Rounded shapes in space rotating to produce gravity with large windows opening to colossal mirrors that reflect in sunlight. This one, however, has a lot of interesting peculiarities. First, they're about twenty miles long, and the internal habitat is four miles in diameter. Second, they come in pairs. They counter-rotate, having a gyroscopic effect, pointing the mirrors always toward the sun. I can never hope to understand just how gyroscopes work, but I will always be in awe of them. The outer ring is twenty miles in radius, spinning at a different rate than the habitat. These are reserved for agriculture, for space breathin' and space eatin'.

Large enough to have weather patterns, and alien enough to scare the living hell out of you with the interspersed pattern of space, land, space. I recommend the book "Rendezvous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke, which is great science fiction for people that don't mind nearly nothing happening in a novel. It takes place on an alien variant of the O'Neill cylinder that is explored by near-future space people.

Lastly, the Stanford Torus.

This design is the most familiar to anyone who looks at any science fiction at all. An outer habitat ring, that can vary in size a lot, like the gigantic ones here, or like the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey which, while mind-bogglingly large, is more reasonably sized. In this concept, the outer torus would be one mile in diameter, and rotating at one RPM. This concept also employs a goddamn giant ring shaped mirror to be separate from the station, but rotating at the same speed. The outside would have a familiar amount of gravity, but the inner sections would be full of calcium-lacking floaty people and unhappy robots.

There isn't much to say that hasn't already been said. I presume on most of these habitats, there would be some manner of simulated day/night cycle as not to inspire insanity in the residents of outer space housing. See that shaded part in the distance and what appears to be moving blinder panels? Yeah, I thought so. I also think that, much like the atmosphere of Earth, there would be some kind of artificial way to filter in a blue sky in the mirror-sun facing windows.

Exactly. My future would have less pastel.

There are other speculative sorts of megastructures that zany scientists keep thinking of and naming after themselves. The most notable is the Dyson Sphere, which famed physicist Freeman Dyson seemingly made up to infuriate the scientific community with laziness coming off as aloof brilliance, ala Einstein. See that star? Yeah? Just build a really big sphere around it and everyone lives on the inside. I know just what to call it, too.

Assholes can do that, and so will I someday. There is an easy assumption to make there, but I encourage you not to. I'm delicate, and it has been a long, long day.

A nightmare to consider on my way out:

Wolf-Headed Conjurer

I can't see winter outside at all. It's looked the same out the window since I moved in here, with our landlord's keen idea to plant juniper and pine all around. It will be a disorienting season to be certain in, for certain.

Especially when you rub up against the bushes, and the smell of gin wafts out, you see that it is daytime, and you know that you are not doing something right. Footing is still firm, and general confidence is well below recommended levels. You're sober, you are in your neighbor's yard, and you are cold. Get inside.

The map of where I spend my time regularly over the past few months would, if charted like those distorted population center maps, would place my apartment at the size of a basketball, Coffman Union the size of an honest baseball, with the coffee shop, a couple classrooms, and a park bench appearing at around pea sized. City living is a lot of hiding for me.

Speaking of scale and feeling powerless and insignificant:


Somebody, somewhere must find that comforting. I gave someone a fake tarot reading last week, and they did not find that comforting. It was convincing, and things were looking good, according to the declination of Neptune and the placement of The King of Pentacles. Lying about a larger lie is easy, like Antares swallowing our own sun (and still be hungry! = See above.)

Considering scale, the Comparative Starship Scale Charts are a fascinating and terrible thing. With just pure size in mind, a lot of Babylon 5 could take Star Trek and Star Wars apart. I cannot live with that.

I found it difficult to live with the prospect that the band Dodger out of Orlando, Florida broke up. I've found a way to go on, especially since they're just giving away their last recorded album here.