Sealwyf

Commute

2011-12-02T11:29:00.001-05:00

Deep frost this morning, and rims of ice on the ponds. The bus, adjusting its schedule, dropped me off one stop early in the flat suburban wasteland: road and strip mall, parking lot buffered by a canal and frozen lawn. A flock of geese, feathers ruffled against the cold, paused in their grazing to watch me pass.

Found in a folder

2011-10-20T11:46:00.000-04:00

"It's not as though you have to remain a dragon," said Drusilla, in a superior tone that implied it had been she, rather than Livia, who had mucked about with the spell book. "There's always a whatchamacallit, a counterspell, don'cha know? We just have to find out what it is." "Mrflxgq!" said Max, which was the closest his dragon-mouth could come to forming human words. What those words might

Heat too

2011-07-21T17:06:00.000-04:00

For Mars The heat brought a darkness with it, a blindness caused by glare and slitted eyes. As the outer world vanished, the inner flared into being. Clouds became smoke, buildings pale ashpiles crested with ramparts of flame. Each breath felt thick and liquid, like inhaling hot blood.

Heat

2011-07-20T14:49:00.001-04:00

by Titanium Mars ‎"When it gets that hot, we will all die." Seal made a dismissive gesture. "Surely not all. The old. The ill. The vulnerable. Those who can't afford air conditioning. It's not the end of the world." Her companion pointed upward, at the glaring mosaic of the sun's disc filtered through leaves. "The corona has already engulfed Mercury. By Friday, it will touch Venus. This is

Red

2011-04-21T17:54:00.000-04:00

One of my PSN friends and I are doing "prompt poems". We send each other words or phrases, and send back the poems they inspire. This one was actually from a prompt I sent her: "wolf status". She sent me a lovely poem in reply, describing wolves singing in the boreal forest. But it got me thinking along somewhat different lines, and here's the result. He's a high-status wolf, this one lounging

And, my first public success in the microfiction field...

2010-05-10T13:35:00.003-04:00

My first submission to the PicFic blog and Twitter feed has been accepted! PicFic is one of the main sources of Twitter-compatible 140-character fiction.They were always watching us

First kill

2010-05-10T11:04:00.000-04:00

"Hold your breath, and pull the trigger," his father said. The trophy convict gripped the cage bars, his eyes pleading, as Bobby fired.

Fiction in small packages

2010-05-10T10:59:00.003-04:00

Lately I've gotten interested in the evolving world of very short fiction, such as flash, usually defined as complete stories of 1000 words or under. A further evolution, fiction compressed to haiku length, is the growing world of Twitter stories: complete or implied stories with a maximum length of 140 characters.I've decided to start posting flash and Twitter stories on this long-dormant blog,

PDA drawings

2007-12-24T21:25:00.001-05:00

The Palm T|X has a little graphic notepad. I never used it for much, but over the past few days I've been experimenting. I've been intrigued by the work of Doodle Bean, whose daily PDA drawings grace her eponymous blog and her Facebook page. She obviously has some sort of graphic program -- it's time to explore the Palm catalog again! But until then, I find notepad drawings can be quite

Laplace lily

2007-11-06T17:22:00.000-05:00

A nicely neonized lily, using the Laplace algorithm.

Inverted Sobel duck

2007-11-06T17:11:00.000-05:00

More GIMP experiments: Unsharp Mask, then Edge with the Sobel algorithm, then Invert. I think it looks quite gorgeous.

Shards of wildness, even here

2007-08-27T19:22:00.000-04:00

1.Rockville Pike roars at my back.There, past cement, a flash of yellow:Goldfinch, balanced on a seed-head.2.The storm rolled in while we were at the movie --Beyond parked cars, the rainbow's limb wasCrossed by lightning-slash.3.Gray squirrel, spooked,Jumps onto snow fence, falls,And burrows skull-firstThrough the rigid orange mesh.

Superstition

2007-08-17T16:49:00.000-04:00

Casinos exist in a perpetual twilight, ambient light diminished so the machines can shine. There are no clocks; the seasons of the day are marked by the ebb and flow of patrons, and by early-morning maintenance, oddly mundane in glitter-chiming, stochastic Xanadu.The old man appeared as I worked a dollar single-play 9/6 Jacks machine at the end of a row near the high-limit area. He reminded me of

Hoover

2007-08-08T16:47:00.000-04:00

You would think, with my lifelong obsession with pinnipeds, that I would have run into Hoover, the Talking Seal. Yet it was only yesterday that I stumbled across a reference to him on the Web. A few minutes later, thanks to Google, I had the story. And it is a remarkable one.In the first place, the story is true. Hoover, a harbor seal at the New England Aquarium, could produce recognizable human

One more goodbye

2007-08-06T11:47:00.000-04:00

Susanna Holstein, known as "Granny Sue" on the professional storyteller circuit, has posted a heartrending poem about watching a son leave for the war....and yet my son must gowhile I wave and smileand break apart insideI hope someday soon she will be able to post a poem about watching him return.

Mind your punctuation

2007-08-03T13:36:00.000-04:00

From a story in the Globe and Mail: An excess comma may force Canadian company Rogers Communications, Inc. to pay an extra $2.13 million to use utility poles in the Maritime provinces. The contract states that the agreement "shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior

The way the world increasing knits together

2007-08-03T11:02:00.000-04:00

It would have been rude to take a photograph. But here is what I saw, in the cental business district of DC, about three blocks from the White House: a small brown-skinned woman, in the uniform of a popular coffee house, with a shopping bag in her left hand, her half-eaten breakfast pastry in her right, and on her head, perfectly balanced, an enormous, plastic-wrapped platter of croissants. She

Frosting colors

2007-07-27T16:54:00.000-04:00

I deleted this post, then discovered it's the only reason anyone ever reads this blog. Here it is again:This Icing / Frosting Color Chart appeared on the FOODWINE list:Apricot: 5 parts lemon yellow, 2 parts pinkAqua: 3 parts royal blue, 1 part leaf greenAvocado: 3 parts lemon yellow, 1 part royal blue, 2 parts leaf greenBright Red: 1 part lemon yellow, 5 parts red-redBrown: 4 parts lemon yellow,

Things you have thought, but were afraid to mention

2007-07-27T08:48:00.000-04:00

Columnist Lore Sjöberg reports on a trip to the National Air and Space Museum on the Wired magazine site. Among other things, he comments on the improvised appearance of most spacecraft:In contrast, every object associated with the space race looked as if NASA engineers were only allowed to acquire goods by visiting garage sales and stealing materials from office-building construction sites. I'm

Miscellanea

2007-07-25T15:39:00.000-04:00

The things one finds, wandering through the web:Doonesbury's War, from the Washington Post last October, on Garry Trudeau's decision to maim one of his flagship characters; still touching, still relevant.

"Main Street Bear"

2007-07-24T17:08:00.001-04:00

Excessive use of burn-and-dodge, Gaussian blur, posterization and other graphic tricks; the bear is from Main Street, Hendersonville, North Carolina.

"There may be Irish..."

2007-07-23T13:23:00.001-04:00

Images from the Saint Patrick's Day parade on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, March 11, 2006.

The horse

2007-07-20T10:34:00.000-04:00

My grandfather's ranch smelled golden, like motes of dust dancing in the California sun. Rows of walnut trees receded to infinity. I set out to walk to the end of them; reaching the first tree, I found myself blocked by a wall of cracked gray earth. Even a plow furrow was enough to end my infant explorations.I admired my grandmother's peacocks, but I was not encouraged to visit them. Solomon, the

"Wonderland duck"

2007-06-11T16:15:00.000-04:00

Another GIMP project.

The 747 takes shape

2007-06-01T14:29:00.000-04:00

Actually it's a lot farther along, but I used this image, shot last January, to experiment with the GIMP. I normally wouldn't be messing with the color levels and sharpness quite so much.