Smashwords!

I'm on Smashwords as of this weekend-

http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/AlienZookeeper

I've even made my very first sale, and gotten a good review for something... I hope that this is the start of something good.

This reminds me that I still need to finish Something Abducted!-

Something bright and shiny.

Something small and powerful.

Something lost and found again.

Mine to celebrate, joyfully.

Something good has come to me.

Roleplaying update-

'A Little Trouble on Morris' went well enough, although the end dragged a little... The nex thing that I'm likely to do is a summer fantasy campaign based on FMA and A:tLA-

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/event.php?eid=221479764546473

Any folks in the great Newark area interested?

Vince

Characters and What Every PC Knows for 'A little Trouble on Morris'

            John M. Corradin, Daniel Newton, and Walter have told me they want to play. I have the following roles available (Walt told me last night he wants to play the Mechanic)-

            Captain Clarice/Clarence Perry (gender depending on player), from Old Earth, Herself, owns 60% of The Good Ship 'Molly Brown'

            (Walter) Rudolph Meems, who grew up on Morris and has family there, the Ship's Mechanic/Engineer. Owns the other 40% of MB.

            Spencer Thirteen, part of a clone set, runaway from his family in the League of Free Stars. The spare pilot and super cargo. Been with MB for a year.

            Doc Hop, a rabbit-like alien scientist who is qualified as a medic. His people have a unified interstellar state on the far side of the Star Kingdom of Shenandoah and are currently at peace w/ same. Been with MB for years.

            Cookie, the Cute Rookie, who signed on at Leslie and has earned her nickname by taking over the mess. She's an undocumented treasure and talked her way on through some freinds of the crew at Leslie. She's obviuosly familiar with ships, maybe eve grew in a merchant tramp like MB; she's a mystery, but good people.

The Game Year is 2831 AD; they probably use some other Date System...

           People went out and settle part of the galactic, had some wars and generally lived like humans, not saints. Earth is still the most populous human planet- most other places may top out at hundreds of millions, but a typical planet has a small population, a few tens of millions. Earth is still pretty much the center of science and development; or rather it is, again, after falling of the wagon for a few centuries.

           The Star Kingdom of Shenandoah is 500 years old, and settled organically, with natural population growth. The League of Free Stars was settled about three hundred years ago, and has grown very rapidly with cloning technology; clones still have to be raised, just like the more normal kind of human beings, and there were some horrible mistakes made early on, but their homeworld of Pleroo, 'Plenty', is just about the most populous, other than Earth, and intends on expanding, bring their light and reason to other worlds...

Cut and pasted from my blog-

            Let's look at two possible planets, cleverly calling them Morris and Leslie-

            Planet Morris is 1.5 Earth masses and has a gravity of about 1.15 times that of Earth, 1.3 times the surface area, 663 million square kilometers. It has more water surface, having managed to get and hang onto more, 86% (~3/4^1/2), so the land area is only 93 million, but most of it is arable, nearly half again as much as on Earth. It's a little farther out and cooler, but has more atmosphere, ~2 bars, 1.8 N2 plus .2 O2, which makes it warmer all over.

            Planet Leslie is .5 Earth masses and has a gravity of a little under .8 times that of Earth. 332 m km^2, 50% water, so the surface area is about 10% more than Earths' and about a quarter of that is arable, some 42 m km^2, a little bit more area than Africa or the Moon. Leslie is a little closer and hotter, but with less water vapor as a greenhouse gas, and less atmo over all (.2 inert plus .2 oxygen for .4 bar), the temperatures tend to swing more to extremes over the course of a day or a year.

            People from Morris and Leslie wouldn't stand out much in a crowd of Earthlings, but over all, Leslies are taller and scrawnier than Morrisites, who are more heavily muscled, with less body fat, stronger and faster. They probably live a few years less, too, in a maritime environment, coastal farming, deep-sea mining perhaps, but warmer and milder temperatures. Probably no appreciable snowfalls, but monster storms race across the oceans, sometimes going around and around the planet, getting stronger and stronger until the they spend their fury upon the land...

            Leslies live a little longer, in a more extreme climate with few big storms, but probably lots of desert, and lots of places where tornados stalk the land. The planet's core is more run-down than Earth and the surface more worn-down, too, so there are few mountains and more coastal plains and low, wet, flat marshy and swampy lands by the seas or ocean.

73 Beats

Once upon a lifetime ago,

73 heartbeats spent climbing up the sky-

'Go' with throttle up!

            Mike found the free verse push-pinned to the cork-board at the back of the roll-top desk in his fathers' real office, the one he actually worked in, not the one that looked like it belonged to the CEO of a three hundred million dollar company. This had been added on as an efficiency apartment nearly twenty years ago, and was cluttered like a college dorm. No, more cluttered than most college dorm rooms with which Mike was familiar, his own included. There was a method to the madness, but it still looked bad when his personal assistant had to winkle the old man out of his hermit crab shell to get ready to meet with clients...

            The paper was scrap, picked up from somewhere, at lunch perhaps, the invoice for- Mike turned it over and saw that the company had received sugar, coffee, bottled water and other things from Superior Catering Services on the 19th of last month. Judith had signed for it, had probably had it scanned it into the paperless system by the time the old man had swiped it for the impromptu haiku, but- he checked it out again and counted. Nine, ten and five; what sort of poem was this? The sort the old man would write. His own rules, a lament about that old shuttle disaster and more of his space-shit!

            Mike stopped, just a little ashamed. He knew why his old man was like this, and why... He let out a massive sigh, a quarterback sigh. Then, true to Mr. Hoagland and his AP English from just a few years ago, he snagged the perfectly good writing pad from under a this month's operating reports. He wrote his old man a note, and then revised the poem to make it into a Haiku-

Once, a lifetime past,

73 beats spent climbing sky-

'Go' with throttle up!

5th Part of 73

Do something with '73' (5th part of 73)!

            A Billig Tower (Defeating the Son of Andrew, Leon O. Billig, Analog SF, 1994 http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?114625) is a terraforming machine; it specifically controls one aspect of the environment, humidity, by dehumidifying warm, moist air in tropical and subtropical regions. The hotter and wetter, the better it works, because what it does is force air up a chimney to create an artificial tropical storm. Rising hot wet air expands and cools, meanwhile still being warmer than the surrounding air, so it continues to rise. The carrying capacity of the air goes down as it gets cooler and the relative humidity rises until it reaches 100%, at which point it precipitates. Warm, moist air @30 C and 90% RH has ~29 grams of water per kilogram of air, ~35 g/m^3, at 1.2 kg/m^3. Lower the temperature 20 degrees to 10 C and 100% RH air can carry about 10 g/m^3, 25 g less...
            A 6 meter diameter demonstration tower, pulling in air at 5 m/s, would be 141 m^3/s, 3.5 kg or just under a gallon of water per second. Even at 50% wastage, that's about 40,000 gallons per day, more than 14 million per year. It dehumidifies over 12 million cubic meters per day; reduces the humidity of a cubic kilometer of air by 1.2%. That might even be enough to have a noticeable effect on local weather...

6	m in diameter
5	meters/second
141.37	m^3/s
3.53	kg H2O/s
0.91	gallons/s
3,293	gallons/hr
79,035	gallons/day

            Falling water also can be used to generate power...
            The 5^th part is the rich world-saving father's dehumidifier, to provide seed money for the solar power bubbles. Run into a snag with the Environmental Impact Study, the EPA-Circus...
            Beamed power, birds falling from the sky, are microwaves as safe as the team says they are? (Research this)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower

scroll down to the *big* entry- http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/003578.html

Morning, in Tranquility

( 5/11/11)

After mowing grass last night, I sat heavily in the chair outside the garage,

And looked up at the Moon, high and in the first quarter this May evening.

It is morning in the Sea of Tranquility- that thought led to others;

Space is not over for us (it is hardly yet even begun!), forty-odd years

After the Eagle stooped over the lunar regolith and came lightly to rest.

Many dreams have come and gone, and many disappointments.

Take a deep breath, do not despair, let hope back in.

It is morning, in Tranquility.

My Dad is in the Hospital

My dad went in the hospital last Friday. He's had health problems and things haven't been good the last few weeks; diarrhea, weakness, and infection in his left leg. He's been huffing and puffing, can't breath well, and passed out in the kitchen Friday afternoon while I was still at work. An ambulance came and took him down to Dover, where they determined he had an irregular heartbeat (why he passed out), COPD ( the huffing), and that swollen leg needed antibiotics.

            Being self-centered the whole thing made me feel guilty, as it should. I'd been looking at my dad a lot lately, and noticing the muscle mass he's lost in his arms, the way one leg or the other is swollen, the look in his eyes. I had to bring up the diarrhea when he was talking to the doctor; he doesn't want to talk about his accidents. Or the fact that we've had to help him stand, to get up from the toilet. I didn't call, but that had me worried all yesterday, the thought that he'd be stuck in the bathroom all day.

            But when I got home, mom and dad weren't there, the kitchen table was pulled out from against the wall, and there was a little blood on the floor. Dad had fainted, had hit his arm and bled a little (he's on coumadin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warfarin), a blood thinner), and that was where he was when the paramedics came for him. Mom didn't have time for a note, I finally got a hold of her on her cell phone and learned all this.

            I drove down with that blankness that isn't calm, with jags of emotion. Didn't get in an accident or lose it, but it was bad. Wandered through that maze of a hospital complex until I found the ER. I just wandered around and I was about to ask after my dad, Thomas Cleaver, when I saw my Mom in one of the rooms, with my Dad. He wasn't comfortable, but he wasn't dead. That's a big deal. It didn't register, that possibility, until just that moment.