SRF Heavy Industries

Spreading the Legs of the Cosmic Hilton, my first article on The Footnote, is now available for perusal. Today’s issue has the theme of Space. Needing more space, this space for rent, not enough space, too much space, Pluto, I miss you already. Go have a look.

Also, check out the rest of the bad company I’m keeping now.

This is the entire 5-year run of my TwoHeadedCat column, “Tales from the Third Lobe”. Or perhaps I should say, Tales from the Third Lobe, as it’s more than 135,000 words.

Contact me for reprint rights should any of these suit any insidious purposes you might have.

[*]

Chat with author Ronald Damien Malfi on Monday, July 31st at 10pm EST. He’s the guy that wrote The Nature of Monsters, avaliable for pre-orders now from 5SW.

Get a sample so you’ll see I’m not lying about this being a damned fine book. (Whopping 2.3MB PDF. Sorry.)

Help get the word out. This is the official press release. (600 KB PDF.) Feel free to print this out and hand it to your favorite independent bookstore purchasing coordinator, university or county library, or big-chain bookstore information desk.

Also, set your alarm clocks for the chat. Hop on and bug Malfi about what it’s like to be a professional like honest-to-God-paid-for-it author and how well we at 5SW have taken care of him so far.

There’s your assignment. Get to work.

I’m guessing there are those of you who are curious, maybe, to know what has been absorbing my time over the past year or so. Because since a little over a year ago, posts and comments and, well, signs of life in general have been … sparse. I haven’t been completely incommunicado with everyone, but I did pull back plenty — to regroup, to buckle down, to concentrate, to find out where things were headed.

Last year, around the beginning of March, my day-job became unlivable. Things that I had been told were to happen when I signed on two years prior failed to resolve themselves, and, in fact, started to move backwards. I’m not one for moving hopelessly backwards.

After deciding to go forward on at least one front, I focused on writing. A publisher picked up my novel and invited me to participate in an anthology. I wrote somewhat shy of bunches and bunches, but what I did write was much more solid. Socially, I pretty much withdrew from everyone except the woman I married this past March. I rejoined the functioning (i.e., paying) workforce a few months beforehand and have been steadily improving my situation since then. March also saw the release of said novel, and a couple more people have invited me to write for/with them….

But I’m a bit ahead of myself. Last July 1st saw the paperwork signed for the incorporation of 5 Story Walkup, LLC. It’s a publishing house. Adam P. Knave and I are co-owners. We invited no investors — no outside funding of any kind — and obtained a manuscript of exceptional quality from Ronald Damien Malfi.

Malfi had published a couple of novels already in the horror genre, but the manuscript he gave us was pure literature. Like, Fitzgerald and Hemingway literature. No wonder no other publisher wanted to touch it. You can ruin your name associating with that stuff.

5 Story Walkup doesn’t care about genres or literature. 5SW publishes stories. Strong stories. Knave and I worked to get the money and paperwork in order so that the publishing wouldn’t be an ideal, but a reality. We fought against a very strong counterflow of negative advice. We bribed editors and typesetters with investments in beer futures. Milestones were passed with alarming regularity.

It’s a lot easier than it seems if you don’t mind working.

Anyway, Malfi’s new book is an amazing read. It makes it easier to work hard when you know the story deserves it. For instance, I read the entirety of the manuscript within ten hours of it arriving in my email inbox. I read the entire thing onscreen. That’s an act of love, people.

Manuscript has been received, read, had an advance paid for it, tweaked, edited, early copies printed for reviewers, had marketing planned for it, edited some more, sent to a printing/fulfillment house, had a cover designed, and everything. ISBNs, Library of Congress numbers, Books In Print registrations, press releases written, everything. Reviewers located and pelted with advance copies. Radio station contacts obtained for badgering for interviews. Bios, copyright credits, disclaimers, boilerplate, all the fine print…. Done.

That’s the first half of the job. The second half is selling it. That won’t be hard. Your children will be forced to read this book in college.

So where have I been for the past year? Working. Writing — that’s one job. Publishing — that’s another. Wrangling IT for a small family-owned business that’s just gone corporate across three time zones — that’s a third. Good thing I managed to get three whole weeks with my woman last November/December — in Hawaii, no less, thanks to a radio call-in contest — because we don’t see to much of each other lately. Three jobs, only one paycheck. So far.

TwoHeadedCat, the writing experiment that Adam set up to hone the skills and launch the careers of those who were serious about writing, is drawing to a conclusion this September. I will have nearly a hundred and thirty articles archived there when the doors close. At somewhere around a thousand words apiece, that’s a lot of honing. It’s amazing there’s any knife left. Regardless, I’ll probably still want a regular nonfiction outlet somewhere, so now’s probably the time I should start looking….

As money comes in for Malfi’s ouvre, we’ll start shopping for our second and third manuscripts for 5 Story Walkup to publish. I’ve got a small backlog of short pieces looking for homes, fiction and non, and novels I’ve been neglecting. There’s the literary journal I’ve been wanting to front for almost two years now, and it’s not off the radar. In fact, it’s closer than ever. And I suppose this day-job thing will want me to keep showing up and spinning straw into copper. And I might as well hunt through the 2HC archives and see if there’s anything in there worth compiling, rewriting, refining, and possibly putting back out onto the market. I’ve been practicing reading some of my stuff aloud for potential audio/podcast release, and I’m told I could probably pull it off….

So yeah. I’ve been busy.

You?

Be one of the first 100 people to pre-order The Nature of Monsters by Ronald Damien Malfi and we’ll eat the shipping. That’s right, just $20 gets you the book shipped to you. You pay nothing extra. Plus, we’ll make sure he signs it for you. This offer will not last, so order now. (Books are expected to ship out the first week of September, 2006)

“Love is the seed embedded in the skin,” Donna whispered, “germinating.”

Robert Crofton, a socially inept and naïve young farm-boy, arrives in Baltimore to write his first novel and to reacquaint himself with an old hometown friend: poet-turned-prizefighter Rory Van Holt. In an effort to resume their peculiar and mysterious friendship, Robert Crofton abruptly ensconces himself in Rory Van Holt’s circle of friends. Robert soon finds himself sinking deeper and deeper into the quagmire that is their lifestyle. They are corrupt and privileged socialites, damaged by extraordinary wealth, gluttony, greed, arrogance, and power. Dreamlike the characters float in and out of Robert’s life with inebriated casualness while Robert’s innocence invites these characters to subtly abuse and ridicule him while also accepting him, for the purpose of their own relief against monotony, into their monstrous society.

When Nigel Sweeny, Robert’s eccentric and doomed cousin, falls is love with Rory Van Holt’s fiancée, Donna Taylor, they all suddenly find themselves trapped in a bizarre and often contradictory love-quadrangle.

The Nature of Monsters is both uniquely modern and delicately classic in its style and execution. The story is an exercise in human frailty and love, while exploring the struggle between personal gratification and the damning, acquisitive allure of monetary wealth.

[*]

Scopelogadus beanii

Macruronus novaezelandiae

Bufoceratias wedli

Chaenophryne longiceps

Nessorhamphus ingolfianus

Gigantactis elsmani

Caulophryne jordani

Anoplogaster cornuta

Aphyonus gelatinosus

Eurypharynx pelecanoides

Omosudis lowei

Haplophryne mollis

Melanocetus johnsonii

Argyropelecus gigas

Neoscopelus macrolepidotus

Bathypterois blongifilis

Caristius sp

Melanocetus murrayi

Photocorynus spiniceps

Rhinochimaera pacifica

Astronesthes psychrolutes

Phosichthys argenteus

Rouleina eucla

Malacosteus niger

Notacanthus sexspinis

Pseudoscopelus spp

Grammicolepis brachiusculus

Cryptopsaras couesii

Chauliodus sloani

Haven’t done this in a while. Also, these are just notes.

Can’t ignore units. For instance, in

E is measured in joules or electron-volts or some shit, mass is in grams or kilograms, and c, the speed of light, is in meters or centimeters per second.

Next comes the funkiness. I don’t care to do any actual math right now, so forget what the values might be and just look at the relationships in terms of the units:

to pull some units in at random. I skipped a step or two evaluating c², as (cm/s) squared turns into cm squared per second squared … shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.

Note, already, that there is a weird relationship between energy, mass, distance, and time. The algebra gets a bit hairy, but you can solve the above relationship in terms of any single unit. I’ll do it for you:

You get the picture. There’s some true weirdness here.

Distance and time are special, one might think. An object can have a certain value for mass or a certain value for energy, but can an object have distance? Can an object have time?

We percieve time and distance only with relation to ourselves. An object can be ten inches away, but it can’t be ten inches. Like, as a property. Likewise, an object can’t be forty-five seconds. It can, however, be forty-five seconds ago…. This seems to imply that time and location, duration and distance can only be perceived as a delta. What looks like unaccelerated motion — a steady-state affair — is actually a rate of change of distance (although there is an “imaginary” component — the potential component of motion tangential to the observer rather than perpendicular).

What seems linear obviously isn’t. Our brains take away all the irrelevant crap and leave us with a linearized process that is more relevant to matters at hand. But the details are there if you look.

Imagine two point-sources of visible light. They are, to the best of your ability to resolve, just dots. They are identical in every detail except one is a quarter the brightness of the other. Assuming every other measure of the dots is identical, your brain would jump to the conclusion that one dot is just twice as far away as the other and move on.

Fair enough. But imagine that you also are a tiny dot, with no arms or legs or volume or ability to move or touch or otherwise explore your environment. You can’t even tell which direction you are facing. From where you sit, there is no tangible difference between the point-sources of light, and there never will be. One of them is, however, mysteriously dimmer than the other. You look harder, and you find another thousand of these identical things, all varying only by brightness. So you come up with an arbitrary property called distance, or, more likely, some property that resolves itself to be the square of what we call distance because that makes all the math easier, and you move on….

…until you notice that these things are interacting, and the extent to which they affect one another seems to be inversely proportional to the property you’ve assigned them — except these property values don’t match the ones you’ve given them. They all seem to have different values with respect to one another that has little relationship to the ones you’ve given them. But other than that, everything is still consistent with the math you’ve already developed….

It’s not so funky. Consider one of the primary paradoxes of relativity. Two electrons at rest with respect to each other repel each other proportional to the strength of their charges and inversely proportional to the distance between them. However, if they are both moving with respect to me, I see them as attracting one another proportional to the strength of their charges and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, because charges in motion generate an attractive magnetic field. I actually observe the gap between them closing, but they observe the distance between them increasing….

It really only makes mathematical sense if the “distance” dimension of the universe is maxed out at “1” and all math involving a distance property is inverted and squared. Then “distance” math merely becomes a matter of phase, where items in contact are “in phase” and items that are maximally distant are “180-degrees out-of-phase”.

All of this math works fairly well for time, too. If you’ve ever played with the railroad-car-at-the-speed-of-light thought experiments, you can see how events can be in-phase or out-of-phase depending on motion and acceleration with respect to an arbitrary observer.

The math — especially the math where energy, mass, 1/Δd², and 1/Δt² are converted into one another — makes tons more sense when you close your eyes. Conversion from one property to another is just a rotation in phase-space when all the properties are normalized with respect to one another. See what this does to the math:

Assuming t to be the traditional measure of time, we can express phase-Time T as 1/Δt². Likewise, we make distance-ish property phase-Distance D from 1/Δd². This remanufactures c², the speed of light squared, into some linear scaling constant in terms of T/M.

That’s not very hairy, is it? Things in contact are in phase D-wise, simultaneous things are in phase T-wise, there are no infinities (or if there are, they’ve been shoved away to the other end of the equation where they don’t get in the way).

We can do this same trick for any open-ended property, actually. If we assume that there is a maximum energy value and work in terms of phase relationships, those nasty infinities go completely away when it’s time to run the numbers. This appears to be valid for every other property in QED. Why not time and distance?

[*]

Which

… do I mean?

This one or this one?

Fox News: So “Fair and Balanced” that one of their commentators can step right into the entirely partisan position of White House Press Secretary without his journalism diploma bursting into flames on the wall where it hangs.

Also, Rove’s finally getting his. More of his. More of his something. *sigh*

I thought The Incredibles warned everyone sufficiently against wearing capes.
And also: Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006, by this guy, with a list of mirrors here.

Go on. Burst your little brains.