Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
I’m curious about life after death.
I’m curious about life before life. I’m curious about how life began. I’m curious about how our planet will end.
I’m curious about why we exist, if we exist.
I’m curious about reality.
I’m curious about what my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were like as children. I’m curious about how my ancestors came to the United States. I’m curious about their lives before then.
I’m curious about life on Mars and other planets. I’m curious about the nature of the universe, the nature of energy, the nature of time, and quantum physics.
I’m curious about what is faster than the speed of light and if we will ever find that out.
I’m curious about what life would be like on an atom.
I’m curious about Zeno’s Paradox and other paradoxes and thought experiments.
I’m curious about how technology affects our brains and societies.
I’m curious about what life was like on Earth three thousand years ago.
I’m curious about what we’ll be like in another thousand years.
I’m curious about the dark side of the moon and the far side of the galaxy.
I’m curious about Earth’s first years.
I’m curious about the psychology of people. I’m curious about why the wealthy and powerful want or need more wealth and power. I’m curious about what causes such hatred in some people and why anger and hatred drive people to kill others. I’m curious about why others can be so indifferent to people’s suffering and children starving.
I’m curious about what it is that makes some people so brilliant.
I’m curious about why I struggle to remember scientific words.
I’m curious about charisma.
I’m curious about how the human body works, and how animal bodies work, and fish and birds and plants.
I’m curious about what rocks think and remember.
I’m curious about why we need to sleep and why we dream.
I’m curious about what my dreams mean.
I’m curious about what my cats are thinking when they look at me.
I’m curious about what my wife is thinking, feeling, planning, and remembering. I’m curious about what she really thinks of me.
I’m curious about why art, music, and literature can move me so deeply.
I’m curious about why I like coffee so much.
I’m curious about why I and others are driven to write fiction and tell stories.
I’m curious about the truth behind our world history.
I’m curious about what happened to Atlantis and other ancient places and peoples.
I’m curious about mystery spots and the illusions behind them.
I’m curious about what makes some people so wildly successful while other talented people work hard and remain in the shadows.
I’m curious about fate and destiny and the future and the past.
I’m curious about what the first people who looked up and saw stars thought.
I’m curious about why, what, how, and when.
Other than that, I remain a pretty incurious person.
I learned more new stuff yesterday. I’d never heard of ‘reverse harem’. So I looked it up: romance where a woman has multiple love interests.
In the course of exploring that, I discovered vore, a shortening of vorarephilia: an erotic desire to be eaten or to consume someone. I’ve never had such a desire and it’s alien to me. But I can see how it can be a part of a character or plot. Imagine building this into stories about aliens or time travel. How ’bout a vore time-traveler with an erotic interest in eating other time-travelers? Or a human with a desire to be eaten by aliens?
Then I learned about agnotology: the study of deliberate, culturally induced ignorance or doubt.
I’m constantly amazed by how little I know. I definitely need to expand my spheres of thinking and socializing.
Floofkensian (floofinition) – Originating with or reminiscent of an animal. Origins: Charles Dickens, English Novelist, 1858, “A Tale of Three Kitties”.
In Use: “Floofkensian habits often endured for Jerry long after his floof’s departure, such as looking for them when he woke up in the morning or came home from work or shopping. Years passed before he finally and totally shed those habits.”
In Use: “Dickens left his mark on the household. By the time the rescue puppy passed away, floofkensian routines like afternoon walks, sharing food with the housefloofs, and sleeping with a furry warm body against you was firmly entrenched.”
Out in Texas, they’re busy building a nanny state. Cos words are scawy! Sex is scawy! Books! Scawy! Freedom to read bad! Censorship is good!
They’re trying to take a quantum leap back to another era, where sex is hidden and all the men are virile and heterosexual and women are pristine and pure. You know, like it never was, except in fiction.
Currently, if someone is charged with providing sexually explicit content to a child, they can argue that the content was provided in pursuit of a scientific, educational, or governmental purpose. SB 412 and HB 267 would remove this affirmative defense. This defense exists because, while some people provide explicit content to children to harm them, books that include sexual content have long been a valuable component of secondary education. Many classic works of literature, including “The Odyssey,” “Catcher in the Rye,” “Brave New World,” and “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” have sexually explicit scenes.
Under SB 412, which the Texas Senate voted to advance last week and now awaits approval by the House, teachers and librarians would no longer be able to argue that sexually explicit content can serve an educational purpose. Only law enforcement officials and judges would be exempted under the new law. SB 412 also leaves in place an exception if the adult providing the sexually explicit content is married to the child, which is legal in Texas, with a judge’s approval, if the child is at least 16 years old.
George Orwell would be proud of these ‘modern’ Texans. Set up the cameras! Thy must, in order to ensure no one is circumventing a law and providing ‘dirty’ material to children who are only seventeen. Unless they’re married. Children can be married in Texas. So a child can be married and then be expected to have sex and raise a child but until that point, knowing about sex in literature is verboten.
Man, that is one fucked up state, thanks to the uptight, fucked-up Republicans guiding them. Might as well go ahead and start calling it the Nanny Star State.
My wife related that she and her coffee group were talking about their required high school reading.
There’s a background to this. They go to StoneRidge Coffee in downtown Ashand after exercising at the Y three mornings a week. Their favorite barista, Shawn (sp?), had been on a big reading kick, reading many novels that we consider classics, like Catch 22 and Catcher in the Rye. Today he announced that he won’t be working there any longer because he’ll be teaching high school in Grants Pass. My wife’s group wondered if that’s why he’d been on a reading tear.
They couldn’t remember what they’d read in high school, though. They did recall that they had to read The Pearl by Steinbeck and several of Shakespeare’s plays. The only one they remembered reading was Romeo & Juliet.
After being told this, I recalled reading MacBeth and Hamlet. I also recalled reading The Red Badge of Courage, Beowulf, Call of the Wild, excerpts out of Dante’s Infernal (as we knew it in school) and The Red Pony. I mentioned that what I most remembered reading, though, were short stories. I vividly remember reading A Jury of Her Peers, The Girls at the A&P, The Visitor, Greenleaf, and The Lottery. They each made quite an impression on me. Besides that, there was some Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, and then poems by Frost and Whitman, and essays out of Walden: Life in the Woods.
It’s all a bit sketch, though. Because I enjoyed reading fiction on my own and read Catch 22 and Catcher in the Rye. Papillion was big as a novel then — this was before the movie — as was the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, and Stranger in a Strange Land. Besides that stuff, I was reading a lot of science fiction and fantasy, along with spy thrillers (think Fleming and Le Carre). Then there was Jaws by Peter Benchley, and other popular fiction like that, such as Fear of Flying, Portnoy’s Complaint, In Cold Blood, The Onion Field, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Bell Jar, The Drifters, Centennial, The Thorn Birds, Hotel, Airport, The World According to Garp, Cancer Ward, and Herzog.
I was also involved with the Junior Great Books program for several years, and was required to read their books, stories, and essays, muddying up memory a little more. Further complicating it are courses in French, Russian, Jewish, and American literature in college.
All those books and titles start running together after a while, you know? At least for me. I admire those who can keep it all straight.
Michael Seidel, writer 