Improv

How little would I be surprised if Anthrax Cat from Warren Ellis's Metropolitan was a model for Ribo Zombie's Skratchy Kat in the short story "The Scab's Progress"?

I will accept the possibility that the Moon may be geologically active and so, according to a broad interpretation of the Gaia hypothesis, alive, as my birthday present.

No, no, no, I thought, reading Simon here. The reason no music criticism seems vivid or vivifying to you anymore is because you are old now. When you're young, things you read can strike you as new, and the things you experience all strike you as new, and the writing you do about what you experience, and the things that you love, it's all so new, so exciting, it's so alive it makes you hurt and it makes your readers, who are you in other circumstances, hurt, too.

It's completely different when you're old, as the young you probably suspected, and as you now recognize, as someone older, except when you remember how you used to be, and how much different and sometimes better it used to seem to be young.

It wasn't better, and you know that, too, but it feels as if were better, you remember it being better, but you're wrong, and those young readers and writers are wrong, too, in their ways, not in your ways, and you can't understand them anymore, and it makes you both sad, the younger reconstructed you and the older you.

But it doesn't make them sad. They don't know about you or care about you. They live differently. What's important to them too often seems trivial to you, but it isn't trivial; at least, it's no more trivial than things you used to deem important when you were young, and which, over time, you've invested effort and belief into feeling the importance of again in your mind, though it may well have been unwarranted then and now, and though none of these young people know or care about what you think or believe is important. Nor do they care whether you believe their art is unimportant or inaccessible or trivial. Their knowledge works differently. They nouse. You don't nouse. You can't. You are now too old.

And so am I.

Characters in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books realistically worry that wealthy, powerful, entrenched self-interested groups of people might disregard the damage they've done to the Earth and instead simply move away off-planet, using technologies available only to people as powerful—and as self-interested—as themselves. It's dismaying and hard to believe, but those characters' worries have become our realistic worries.

You scored as The Operative. You are dedicated to your job and very good at what you do. You've done some very bad things, but they had to be done. You don't expect to go to heaven, but that is a sacrifice you've made for a better future for all. The Operative 63% Simon Tam 63% Zoe Alleyne Washburne 56% Inara Serra 56% Hoban 'Wash' Washburne 56% Shepherd Derrial Book 50% River Tam 44% Capt. Mal Reynolds 31% Jayne Cobb 31% Kaylee (Kaywinnet Lee) Frye 31% Which Serenity character are you? created with QuizFarm.com

(I was also a tie, between Simon and the Operative, this time. I said I was good at what I did rather than that I'd do _anything_ for my family.)

I think I should do my part to inform whatever fractional segment of the public may read me here that the Portland Society for Calligraphy has a new, spiffy website, courtesy of Gretchin.

You know what I appreciate about the people who make webcomics? They're enough like me to know that if somebody says "Monday" is the time they'll have something done, there are people in the world—such as myself, say—who will expect that thing to be done at 12:01 a.m. and not a minute later. People—such as myself—who will be awake at twelve-thirty Monday morning, at loose ends, and who will surf to websites like Questionable Content or Ctrl+Alt+Del and be greeted by new material, as promised.