More Project Black Kraken AI Art

 

DRACO REPTILIAN UNDERLINGS

SQUATCH RESCUE

SQUATCH RESCUE

CUTTLEFISH-LIKE BEINGS THAT LIVE IN THE ATMOSPHERES OF GAS GIANTS UNDER A BENEVOLENT AI

AI Art Based on My Fiction (Project Black Kraken and Rentkids)

The Squatch boards a UFO... (Project Black Kraken)

The Squatch boards a UFO...(Project Black Kraken)

Charismatic Lizard Warlord... (Project Black Kraken)

Then-Captain Solomon Berg fights Druuz the charismatic martian lizard warlord with a mechanical tail...(Project Black Kraken)

Abn Mur and the Crimson Militia... (Rentkids)

The planet Tantalus II...(Rentkids)

Tantalite Frigate...(Rentkids)

Tantalite Frigate...(Rentkids)

Rufus Scalzi, blind former mafioso...(Rentkids)

Devna D'Arx...(Rentkids)

Devna's adoptive mother, Evette D'Arx...(Rentkids)

Starfarer spacecrafts...(Rentkids)

Tantalite cities...(Rentkids)

 

The Future of this Blog (Part 2)

 I am going to try to resurrect this blog. I need to have more confidence that I do have a unique voice. My publishing contract should be evidence of that. The post I made a few weeks ago seemed to nuke my readership and I obviously need to get them back or attract new readers.

I will write about politics but I cannot write anything about Charlie Kirk because I want to keep my job. Apparently this is career-death so as  I have nothing positive to say about the man, I will be silent.

I do notice a pattern though of disaffected Republicans going after right wing demagogues and then being branded as "extreme leftists." Which is very, very annoying. But predictable. 

And people murdered by the state have been smeared. Also predictable.

My frenemy, Dr. Silverman, found an old video of me warning about the separation of church and state collapsing and criticizing the "illegal war" (Iraq). I told him how right I was. There is hardly separation of church and state left, and there is another illegal war (Iran)! He called me "Cassandra," which I am.

In 2007-2011 I wrote a novel predicting, basically, MAGA. It was a "first' novel. Not fit for publication. It had a lot of old ideas I have discarded. Ideologies I shed. But it was quite predictive. It predicted Occupy. It predicted billionaires in the president's inner circle. It predicted the rounding up and killing of immigrants.

I will continue to make predictions.

A Note on Israel-Palestine

On October 7th, I cried all day. I cried for the Israeli victims, and I cried for what I knew would be the future Gazan victims of an asymmetrical war that risked turning into a genocide.

That was my first week at my current job. I cried every day, reading the news, as the death toll in Gaza mounted

I am a Jew. A secular Jew, humanist, atheist, but a Jew nonetheless.

I have never been to Israel-Palestine. Here is why:

When I was 9, my parents made me attend Hebrew School on Sundays at the Jewish Community Center. I didn't want to go and was very resistant. Didn't want to spend time with kids who made fun of me on Sundays. Didn't want to learn Hebrew.

My teacher, a young guy closer to my age than my parents', showed us a video of himself as a teen, planting trees in the desert.

"Trees in the desert."

I didn't know those trees were being planted over bulldozed Palestinian homes, but I knew Israel was a place of conflict, and no one was dying over trees. I didn't trust this Hebrew school teacher, and when I did learn about the conflict there, as a slightly older kid, my sympathies were with the Palestinians.

I refused Birthright because I didn't want to go to a country where I had more rights than someone who was born there. 

I believe in a one-state solution. A secular. pluralistic state. This is the position of most of If Now Now, the Jewish peace and anti-occupation organization I belong to. 

At least until we can have a no-state solution. That would be my ultimate preference.

I believe Jews and Arabs both have a claim and a right to the land. Government doesn't. You should be able to live anywhere you want. You shouldn't be able to enforce a government. Governments don't have rights. People do.

And people are not their governments. Hamas is a terroristic organization, and the IDF practices state terrorism. But there are civilians on both sides who only want peace and equity.

I hope for peace. I hope to visit Israel-Palestine one day. But I cannot under these circumstances. If that means I never do, then so be it. I am disgusted by Israeli Apartheid. My dad says Israel was founded by trauma victims. That may be true. They seem to have not learned from the past.

Never Again. Never Fucking Again.

Update on the Tantalus II Trilogy (6/13/20206)

 

An update on the Tantalus II Trilogy and my professional life...

I am anticipating getting the editors' notes in July. I am taking another week off work on the week of my birthday to work on the novels.

It is extremely exciting.

In the meantime, I also have been given permission by the state board of social workers to register for the LCSW exam! So next comes study and a practice test.

This too is extremely exciting.

These things are within my grasp.

The Tantalus II Trilogy will see bookshelves probably next year.

And my life will totally change.

I  have also updated the links page of this blog to include my author profile at Roan and Weatherford.

In the meantime, enjoy these AI generated pictures of ships and characters.

Future of this Blog

I started this post a month ago and never finished it.

I didn't get beyond one sentence: I will be honest- I do not particularly like blogging.

In conclusion:

I prefer writing fiction. I don't like to present myself as anything like a "talking head" or an "internet personality." I despise especially the latter and have not the enthusiasm for presenting as one that it would require to succeed. Advice I get goes "You have to have a blog" as practically a prerequisite for getting published.

But I've got a contract and my novels are in the editing process. So I will get published regardless of whether or not I make another blog post. Which I will do, to promote the book, but I should explain the factors that have led to this blog being rather inactive rather than the firebrand that was promised in the beginning.

The things I would want to say on a blog, that I once could say, now have much more serious consequences, such as loss of job or federal surveillance, or court convictions. The Right Wing is extremely litigious. I don't want to lose my job (where I help a lot of people who otherwise don't have support) or by surveilled or imprisoned by the Trump Government for speaking truths that are equally as personal as they are political. I also work in a rumor mill (E.G. a hospital) where everyone finds out everything about everyone else. My job puts me in a very visible position in which I need to avoid the appearance of being "political" at all. And while my writing is certainly "political" or at least, politically charged, I prefer writing fiction because I can speak less like a know-it-all through different characters with different perspectives (which is how all three of my novels are written, with alternating perspectives).

As stated, I dislike internet personalities and social media. What social media presence I do have is going to be handled by a third party for the remainder of my career as a writer. This third party is my sister and her girlfriend. They have a head for doing that and not getting dragged down into the muck, which is an ability I lack.

It's not that I will never make another blog post again. I will plug the books. I will plug appearances. I will continue to attempt to use this blog to gain publicity for my written work. But there are a lot of reasons why I haven't been using it to go on rants about current events, and these reasons are far from apathy. I care deeply about the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, about racial and gender injustice under Trump's regime, about the dystopian rise of LLMs, the dystopian rise of Christian Nationalism, and other aspects of the "whole" material struggle for liberation. But I don't feel motivated to rant online.

I am doing what I can by trying to be the best social worker I can be (which is harder than it sounds).

Really, my day-to-day is patient-centered and while mental health is a worthy subject I will consider using this blog to discuss, most of what I deal with is covered under HIPAA and I am not able to talk about it. I also don't particularly want to get into the weeds of why things are done and how they are done at the hospital where I work, for the same reasons I don't want to, for example, make a post telling how I really feel about Charlie Kirk's assassination, for example. That falls into the job "Not wanting to lose my job" category.

And if that makes me a bad anarchist, I don't really care, because I am just trying to be the best social worker I can be, and that requires a lot of personal sacrifice. Key word there is "personal," so that's a no-go area for blogging, too, I guess.

I guess there's just not much I would want to blog about these days. There are enough other voices out there already speaking truth to power about the things I care passionately about. 

Lately, I've been listening to a lot of WHYY at work. My officemate John seems to appreciate it. That's the public broadcast news station in the Philly area. I am mourning the loss of Knowledge Fight from my life, as the Knowledge Fighters Dan and Jordan have hung up their gloves and ended their podcast. I listen to a lot of podcasts generally. Mostly comedy podcasts. I am trying to maintain a healthy media diet.

Blogs are not part of that healthy media diet. Any more than Twitter (which I refuse to call "X"), facebook, or whatever is big now. I don't really see a return to form for this blog. It's not an intentional toning down. Just, a redirection of energy.

I have published several stories on Patreon!

 Please visit my Patreon Website: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheSpeculativeAnarchist. I have published several stories there including "The Playground."

I have also posted- only for paid members- a preview of the first chapter of the first novel of the Tantalus II Trilogy, "Rentkids."

All these stories take place within the Tantalus II universe, in other corners of the Local Group of galaxies- Milky Way, Triangulum, Andromeda. Several of them are "extraplanetary post-apocalyptic." 

The page is currently under review to ensure it meets Patron's guidelines but I am sure this is just a formality, my account was inactive due to non-use for a long time and I have resurrected it like a zombie.

For free, several stories are available, or for only $1 a month you can get all the stories.

In other news, I have recently submitted a short story, "The Education of a Starfarer," to about 8 different publications (that allow simultaneous submissions) and look forward to hearing back about it. This story serves as a window into the universe of my novel series. It follows the struggle of a young woman to survive on a hostile planet after her father is killed on a gun running mission.

The above story will not be available on Patreon at this time, however. 

Update on the Tantalus II Trilogy

 Before the big snowstorm two weeks ago, I submitted all three novels in the Tantalus II trilogy to Roan & Weatherford before going into work Saturday night, sleeping in my office, working a therapy shift Sunday, and sleeping overnight again, finally going home Monday. Both hardcore things. My patients were enheartened by my solidarity. One of them genuinely wanted to know if my camping cot was comfortable enough.

I realized after the first night that I was sleeping in a room I had once been assaulted in. But I think I have dealt with my trauma from that, what trauma I had. A man whose life I was trying to save attacked me and left me with a nasty and painful concussion. I still see him, he still uses our services. But I have resigned to the fact we will  discharge him badly each time and not send him to a higher level of care as I tried to do.

Anyway, I am #3 on the queue for development, so I expect I will be hearing soon from R&W about what changes they want made or what questions they have. It is exciting, feels like a major milestone.

In the meantime, I am working on my next longform piece. I have several candidates- shorter pieces I can expand, as well as one concept which is unwritten as yet but for which I have begun to develop characters. It is a military virtual reality simulation scenario involving characters belonging to different rank structures within the Rigelian Expeditionary Forces, Rigel exerting an influence over Tantalus II in the trilogy. This novel would more thoroughly explore the Rigelian military that used to rule Tantalus II.

#3. Won't be a long wait before I get feedback. I am very good at accepting feedback that is critical in my process and incorporating recommended changes. I think the publisher will find me easy to work with. 

I am still not in love with blogging. I suppose I prefer to speak through my characters, more comfortable with them having contrasting perspectives that I am in offering my own perspective these days, especially when that perspective tends to be a kind of monolithic perpetual outrage.

There's nothing I could say about the fascist regime in charge of this country that hasn't already been said more eloquently by others. Nothing I needs clarification by me, a relatively privileged member of society. I would prefer to let the voices of groups like Palestinians, Trans and Nonbinary persons and Undocumented persons speak for themselves. I am a member of If Not Now, a Jewish anti-occupation group, but if you can tell from my last couple of posts, I am not engaging much with politics online these days. I maintain my anarchist political beliefs but I find online engagement about politics to be valueless and unpractical. As I also find most social media.

I couldn't even tolerate the relentless Karens in r/socialwork (and neither could my clinical supervisor) so don't expect to see me on social media soon. When the book comes out I will do an Amazon Author Central profile page, going by R&W's recommendations.

Space Rock (Music)

 When I was a young kid, my dad was best buddies with Dan Octavius of the Memphis Mobile Radio Show (link). Dan would make me mixtapes with outer space themes, and this was how I learned about bands like ZZ Top, Pink Floyd, the Kicks, the Byrds and Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Even today these are songs I enjoy. Dan Octavius always had a spacey element to his persona, he is a true old school hippie and a music buff who spreads joy and good grooves. Check out his website and his podcast.

A couple of the old goldies Dan Octavius left me with: 

Supersonic Rocket Ship (The Kinks)

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun (Pink Floyd)

Beautiful Zelda (Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band)

Hey Mr. Spaceman (The Byrds)

Planet of Women (ZZ Top)

Space is the Place (Sun Ra)

My PhilCon Schedule

Philadelphia Science Fiction Convention is the oldest convention of its type in the United States. And it is Friday through Sunday. I am a panelist. The following is my schedule:

826
Are We Approaching 451°F?		Plaza 4	Literary	Panel	Fri 7:00 PM	Duration: 00:50
	Description In Ray Bradbury's literary classic "Fahrenheit 451", people had parasocial relationships  with their TV shows, sought constant mind-numbing stimulation from their "shell" earbuds, and they  did. not. read. books. It was meant to be a dystopian future that could never be, and yet... It seems like the only thing he was missing was the internet and that people didn't need books to be burned,  they'd stop reading on their own. When reality imitates fiction so closely, can we learn from that fiction in our efforts to correct course?
	Panelists' Publication Names (Badge Names)	Email addresses		Comments
702
The "You Missed The Point" Starter Pack		Plaza 3	Fandom	Panel	Fri 9:00 PM	Duration: 00:50
	Description Tyler Durden, Homelander, Daenerys Targaryen, Rick Sanchez, The Joker and Harley  Quinn, Ramona Flowers... They're supposed to be the moral at the end of the story that teaches you the dangers of hubris and power imbalance, yet so many people seem to idolize them instead.  What is it about these toxic characters that inspires people to willingly miss the point?
	Panelists' Publication Names (Badge Names)	Email addresses		Comments
		sallena20@yahoo.com
776
Writing Dystopias in a Dystopian World		Plaza 5	Literary	Panel	Sat 1:00 PM	Duration: 00:50
	Description What are the uses of dystopian fiction in today’s world of global plagues and toppling  institutions? When the world seems to be falling apart, do authors feel the need to pull back from the brink?
	Panelists' Publication Names (Badge Names)	Email addresses		Comments
772
Dystopias Then and Now		Plaza 3	Literary	Panel	Sun 12:00 PM	Duration: 00:50
	Description Caste societies. Resource scarcity. State surveillance. Dictatorships. These themes are almost requirements of dystopian stories, yet authors manage to rework them over and over  to create frightening, often prophetic, spins on the worst ways society can develop. How have dystopian tales evolved over time, and what might they look like in the future?
	Panelists' Publication Names (Badge Names)	Email addresses		Comments
671
Voicing Multiple Characters		Plaza 5	Media	Panel	Sun 2:00 PM	Duration: 00:50
	Description When reading a work aloud for an audience, whether it is your own story or if you're  providing narration for someone else's, how can you make the voice of each character distinct not only in tone, but in mannerisms?
	Panelists' Publication Names (Badge Names)	Email addresses		Comments

The Tantalus II Trilogy: I Will Soon Be A Published Author

(Tantalus II, a red, Mars-like world that has been terraformed to support human lifie)

I am roughly halfway through editing a series of three books, a thematic trilogy set on the dystopian  planet Tantalus II in the far-future. I have a contract with a publisher and expect to be published within a year, approximately. I am currently bringing the books up to their standards according to a style guide.

(A southern desert city on Tantalus II)

This is extremely exciting for me. I have been a published author since 2020 when I sold a story to radio but that felt more ephemeral. This is a book deal: a trilogy. They read the first book and they asked if there were others; I said it's a trilogy, and they said "We'll take the trilogy."

(Devna, hero of Book #1, "Rentkids")

I will keep readers of this blog informed of the launch date as it approaches. For now the books are in an editing process.

(Tantalus II is dominated by the mafia)

Watch this spot for news about the Tantalus II Trilogy!

Millennium: Season 1- the best of the three

 

"I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen."

-W. H. Auden

Anyone reading this blog can tell that I am a big fan of The X-Files. Millennium was a sister-show to that seminal piece of television brilliance, intended by creator Chris Carter as an exploration of a "more mature" version of the Mulder character. Enter Lance Henricksen, playing behavioral profiler Frank Black. Black has a gift: the ability to see inside the minds of killers. His work terrifies his wife, Catherine (Megan Gallagher), and the both of them struggle to keep their young daughter, Jordan (Brittany Tiplady) away from Frank's work. At the beginning of the series, Frank, following a nervous breakdown, moves his family back to Seattle to an idyllic yellow house and begins working for the Millennium Group, a consulting agency for law enforcement. Black's contact with the Group comes mostly through Peter Watts (Terry O'Quinn), and in the first season, we learn very little about the Millennium Group's motivations, only that they are more than meets the eye. Frank is called to consult for a number of bizarre, sexual and religious crimes in the first season, and usually Frank's profile subjects are deranged, violent men... but in the first season there are a few excursions into the supernatural, which culminate in the murder of Frank's best friend, Bob Bletcher (Bill Smitrovich), by a demonic entity in Frank's own home. Shortly after his encounter with the demon, who takes the form of an attractive woman, Lucy Butler (Sarah Jane Redmond), Frank begins to perceive events around him differently than others. He becomes aware of cosmic evil, and of a struggle between evil and good that is being played out around him.

Henricksen delivers a strong performance as the quiet, capable, focused Frank Black. Black is not your typical TV hero. He is middle aged, retired, and while quite capable of action, his primary talent is intellectual or spiritual in nature. He sees into the minds of killers, rapists, and other criminals, catching fleeting glimpses of their skewed realities which help him to catch them in the end. Another part of the strength of this show is its frayed, apocalyptic setting. Watching Frank Black solve the mysteries put to him by the Millennium Group, one really gets a sense of society on the edge. The quote for this post, displayed at the beginning of the first episode, says it all: "I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen." Buried in the mythos of Millennium is the nugget of an idea that as the apocalypse approaches, and society degrades and devalues itself, a new generation of killers are rising to prominence.

Bob Bletcher's death at the hands of a supernatural, demonic entity shifts the show in a direction more familiar to X-Files fans: from this point on, Frank becomes aware of great evil, in a way he couldn't have known it before. The second season, which I plan on reviewing separately, takes this evil presence and runs with it, featuring a plethora of demons set loose upon the Earth by powerful forces barely comprehensible to most men. Frank, because of his gift, is able to see these demons (and angels) as they truly are.

Millennium is a noir, nineties detective/supernatural drama featuring top-grade acting and excellent scripts. Some of the episodes, particularly in the first season, can be slow, but when Millennium is on its top game, it really shines.

Lexx: The Dark Zone Stories

 

Lexx is mildly more dramatic than soft core porn. And that's not a bad thing. Spanning thousands of years and featuring a crew of misfits aboard a gigantic insectoid starship, Lexx involves just about every fetish there is. From bondage to cyber-fetishism, Lexx had it all. The series began as four TV movies, which relied heavily on CGI and were released in 1997. In 1998/1999, the series debuted on the Sci-Fi Channel to a ready audience. Think "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" meets "Twin Peaks" with a dose of Skinemax.

Lexx starred Michael McManus, Brian Downey, and Xenia Seaburg, who replaced Eva Haberman as Xev from Series 2 onward. It was a Canadian/German co-production. It featured heavy innuendo and little else, but in terms of setting it was brilliant: human civilization and the Insect Civilization were ancient enemies, the insects having been defeated in the distant past. But one insect survived, and implanted its consciousness inside a human host who ruled as "His Divine Shadow," a cooler title not existing.

His Divine Shadow engineered the Lexx, a massive, planet-destroying insectoid starship which was stolen by Stanley Tweedle, a disgraced freedom fighter and former security guard, Zev/Xev, a Cluster Lizard/Love Slave Hybrid,790, a disembodied robot head, and Kai, Last of the Brunnen-G warriors who defeated the Insects thousands of years ago. Kai is dead: he has no ambitions, no desires, no feelings. He acts out of a renewed sense of honor after having been used, bodily, by His Divine Shadow as an assassin for 2,000 years. Kai does not seek life; his friends seek it for him. He himself believes that "The Dead should not interfere with the Living." Zev/Xev is a formerly ugly woman transformed into a beautiful love slave. During her transformation process, her DNA got mixed up with a vicious Cluster Lizard and she inherits super-strength and vivacity from her Cluster Lizard side, as well as the ability to curl up in a circle and roll at rapid speed. 790 received the brainwashing treatment meant for Zev, and after his body was consumed by a the Cluster Lizard that merged with Zev, he became a robot head and self-appointed love martyr (later in the series, a reprogrammed 790 fixated on Kai). Stanley is the only pure human of the cast, and he is a cowardly, selfish, lustful bastard who happens to inherit the key to the Lexx, enabling him to command its planet-destroying faculties.

If you like B-Movies, you'd probably like Lexx. There's loads of satire, sarcasm, necrophilia, and intentional cheesiness. It's like The Rocky Horror Picture Show: The Series. It's not for everyone though. Lexx can be offputting to those who were raised on morally upright science fiction. It's not a show that takes itself seriously, at least not until the 3rd series, where the crew of the Lexx are literally caught between heaven and hell, in the form of two planets in a parallel universe that function as a real afterlife for the souls our heroes have encountered in the Light Universe. The 4th series relocates the action to a pastiche of modern-day Earth circa 2000 AD, and explores the consequences of the Lexx crew's interference in the afterlife. It turns out that Earth is at the very center of the darkest part of the Dark Zone, the universe of chaos and depravity. But we knew that already: just read my review of Millennium.

Prey: A flawed series with an original concept

 

Science fiction never does the theory of evolution justice. Not that it hasn't tried, though. In "Prey" (1998), a Bio-Anthropologist named Sloan Parker (Debra Messing) discovers evidence of a new species of hominid that has evolved separately from Homo sapiens. They're called the "Dominants." They are, so the series says, to us what we were to neanderthals: a new and improved breed. They are organized like a secret society, and they brainwash their own children into lethal killers. Their goal is to displace us, like we displaced the neanderthals. And no, none of this makes any scientific sense at all.

Firstly, the idea that humans were directly responsible for the neanderthals' extinction is not given much credibility in modern anthropology. Scientists look to other factors like disease and the environment to explain the disappearance of Homo neanderthalensis. They weren't picked off one by one by modern humans with more advanced technology. Rather, nature selected against their survival, and modern humans moved in after they were gone.

The idea that another species of human has evolved to occupy our same ecological niche and is now competing with us is alluring. Making the enemy an alternately-evolved human immediately meant that the Dominants of "Prey" were complex and layered. Adam Storke played the token Dominant teammate of the good guys, a Dominant who broke his mental conditioning and worked with the heroes to stop the extermination of mankind.

The science is silly: Dominants are superbeings, with superior strength, intellect, mental abilities similar to ESP, and the females have four uteruses. Of course, the Dominants have access to advanced genetic engineering, so some of these traits maybe artificial, but it begs the question of how such a species as humans would have evolved in the first place if evolution is capable of producing superbeings. Evolution, of course, does not produce superbeings, much less ones that can blend in unsuspectingly among the populace despite all of them supposedly sharing a more recent common ancestor than with any other human groups (there are Caucasian Dominants and African-American Dominants, and no explanation is given as to how they evolved these appearances when they are all supposed to have been from one abandoned village in Mexico). It's probably a good thing that they didn't cast Latino actors exclusively as the inhuman Dominants, as that would have had some very unfortunate implications. Nonetheless, "Prey" presents ancient mysteries such as a mysterious stone pillar, destructive nanite technology, and genetic engineering by superhumans, all with some significance to the overall plot. Unfortunately, in 13 episodes, it never had a chance to wrap up half the plot threads it started, and the episodic nature of the storylines felt dated when it aired. The creep-factor is strong, and the acting is top-notch. Vincent Ventresca, of "The Invisible Man," plays Sloane's geeky lab partner, and Larry Drake appears as the shadowy Dr. Atwood, a government scientist who knows more about the Dominants than he's letting on.

"Prey" is worth a watch, at least for a chuckle at the bad science, but it was no "First Wave."