There Can Be Only One: The Prize

Mike, AKA Ghostrider, has donated a carved plaque to use as a prize for the Wandering Tribes PED game.  I won’t lie; while I do love the idea of a new format, my entire reason for joining this game was to play for the plaque.

Here’s one of the pictures for your perusal, posted after long effort and great struggle by several of us working together, opposing the forces of malignant technology.  (Odd; it’s like it’s some sort of metaphor for a Planets battle against the Robots or the Cyborg or something.)

Angels 8 Riot Feed, from Transmetropolitan

“Y’see, they say journalism is the art of controlling your environment, but that’s all wrong.  I can’t control anything with this typewriter.  All this is, is a gun… It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need.  Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.”

Spider Jerusalem, Transmetropolitan:  Back On The Street (more…)

Ian Malcolm On Science, by Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park as a morality tale.  A lot of his fiction is like that; he created a brilliant story to act as a frame for his statements on a logical position, usually an unpopular one.  This novel was meant as a modern Frankenstein tale, and his argument can be read in the words of Ian Malcolm.

It should be remembered that Malcolm’s words do not necessarily reflect the actual views of Mr. Crichton.  They were the thoughts of a character, and they were designed not to convince us of anything in particular so much as to make us think.

We’ve become so used to people telling us what to think that we often neglect to do so for ourselves.  The following, therefore, are several examples of unconventional yet curiously logical perspectives.

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WALDEN (an excerpt), by Henry David Thoreau

Economy

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what (more…)