More Bionic Horses

Malcolm Reynolds from FireflyAt times like these civilized society needs more celebrities and swindlers like it needs a pudding can without a pull tab. They promise you sweet chocolaty goodness, but then stiff you when the cows come home.

In past posts I’ve written about the sustainable ethics of such outlaw heros as Bo and Luke Duke and Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly. And it still stands true, what we need today are outlaws with a heart of gold — bad guys who make us want to be good. But where have they gone? (click here to jump ahead to the punchline.)

In a day and age too glib for good guys to survive and too corrupt for the general populous to continue its complacency, we need these law-flauting, damsel-rescuing, firebrands more than ever, and yet… where can we turn? [Read more...]

Occupy This! Wall Street & Reality TV

Tis the season for occupation. And why not? I’m occupying my chair as I type. From Wall Street to Walmart, I say it’s time for hardworking and hard-complaining American citizens to get to occupying.

The only problem I keep running into is that I don’t know how to occupy an ideal or a concept. I’d love to occupy greed or corruption in order to break it’s will, bust it down to mere covetousness, slap it around a little and toss it to the curb. But it’s not exactly like occupying a Honey Bucket. There’s no latch on the door that switches from ‘vacant’ to ‘occupied’ (as far as I can tell).

But then again, it’s not like Wall Street or corporate greed or whatever entity we’re invading was actually vacant to begin with. So I guess what we’re talking about here is a relocation program of some sort–removing half of the venture capitalists and day traders to replace them with what? Dissidents? Hippies? That hardly seems any better. We can’t have the trading floor resounding with “Sell! Sell! Kill! Kill! while the rest of the group gets the munchies, now can we? [Read more...]

Checklist for Upcoming Apocalypse

zombie checklistSurprisingly, despite all the nights you’ve spent awake mentally preparing for the apocalypse, there are almost certainly things you’ve forgotten to take into account. Today we’ll deal with the most commonly forgotten elements of end times preparation. Because once the plumes of ash are rising into the stratosphere you don’t want to remember you’ve left your Breathe Right strips in your glovebox (outside the safety perimeter).
 
7.) Weather stripping: I can’t stress how important this simple task is. Granolas and “Herm the Thermwise guy” have been telling you to do this for years now and you’re still putting it off. But as the toxic fog that turns you inside out creeps through the cracks around your rattling windows you’ll be wishing you hadn’t. [Read more...]

Build your Post-Apocalyptic Compound with Hemcrete

by Miroslavk82When acid rain starts to fall, mutant scorpions attack and marauding wackos try to eat your flesh you don’t want to find yourself holing up in a ramshackle farm house or an abandoned flat in NYC or London. You’re going to need a practical yet functional fortress to weather the decades of madness until the dove returns with the olive branch in its beak.

To build said fortress you’ll need to consider security, self-sustainability and endurance. The answer to all three is, you guessed it, hemcrete. (Start bugging your representatives to legalize the growing of hemp now, so you can start construction before the end comes.) Hemcrete is a bio-composite building material made by mixing specially prepared hemp shiv with a lime-based binder (Montana Hemp Council Magazine, Vol. 4, 2011).

Basically, this means hemcrete is made from cooked lime and ground up hemp stalks. But the result is as zombie proof, fire proof, mutant bug proof, bullet proof, mohawk proof dwelling. [Read more...]

Off Book (PBS): Steampunk

What is Steampunk? Steam-Reality Sizzle Reel

Googling onto the FBI Watch List

FBIAs a writer I’m on-line more than I’m asleep. Heck, sometimes I use the internet while I’m asleep. My internet time is like dust particles in the air I breath. Without it there wouldn’t be any creative mucous buildup, and therefore nothing spectacular to blow out on the page.

I can’t imagine turning back the clock to a time where I’d have to travel far and wide, accessing specialized libraries, to find the minutia I need to make my fictional worlds pop with that certain air of better-than-real-reality. And I’m immensely grateful for the wonder of the world wide web.

But there is a dark side to being a Google-dependent writer. Namely, the FBI watch list. [Read more...]