Skip to main content

Ah, remember when....?

So a week or two ago I was reading about Boeing's plans to get in on the commercial space tourism racket. You see, I'm one of those dorks who prays to the gods of the internets & cosmos & such that something like hyperspace/ftl travel could be possible within my own lifetime. Yeah, little known secret...and such a bloody long shot, by far, that I'll ever get to see another solar system in this lifetime....but.......

This isn't such a bad compromise, I guess. Even some space travel is better than none. Even just the possibility. It's almost like science fiction beginning to come to life before my eyes. Fantasies fulfilled, even.

It all gets me really really excited, and always has. Like, does anyone else remember the X Prize from a few years back? (Or who won it? or how lulzy it was that the $10mil prize didn't even cover the $25mil that went into developing the winning project? lulz indeed.) That whole thing had me totally jazzed for a while--and reading this article (the interesting bits at the beginning more than the technical shit at the end...) brought back those memories and feelings.

That incurable hopefulness.

All that business about moonbases or travel to Mars and what have you. Even as just a distant glimmer, it warms my heart some. It might actually happen. For all my cynicism and sarcasm, I can still get lit up by "mights" and "could bes" now and then.

Comments

Other things that might interest you...

On phases and fixations.

My fixations are powerful, but they can also be maddeningly ephemeral and fleeting. And I hate that; about them and, honestly, about myself. But I’ve never really  asked why I feel that way... I'll commit immense amounts of time and energy and even money to a fixation for a few weeks, maybe even a month or two, sometimes rebranding my whole personality around it, then just...move on. I'm not sure when I first noticed this pattern—if it was always there or if it emerged and intensified over time—but it's been part of me for a long while. And every time I do, I feel such guilt and shame. Who even am I if I can't be consistent, dedicated, substantive? How disingenuous is it that nothing I care about lasts? I’ve always just accepted those feelings; I’ve never poked at them in earnest. If you can’t tell from the recent flurry of activity on this blog, I have been fixated on blogging; I mentioned in a recent post about this blog that I had a compulsion to revamp the whole bl...

Oatmeal is tasty.

{slurps up berry-oatmeal-deliciousness} Indeed. I need to work on rebuilding a morning schedule. I can be zombie-like enough that I'll waste a perfectly good morning, and have often slept through many. And, really, it's such a useful time of day.

My new favorite painting.

I, generally speaking, love art. I wish I understood it better; sometimes I can articulate its effects on me and what I think; at other times, that's tough for me. This is an attempt at understanding art, if only by trying to understand my experience of it.¹ The title of this post is a bit funny, tho: "New" is misleading—I first drafted it 6 years ago in Dec 2017, updated it in Aug 2018, and revised it a bit this week (Feb 2024). I'll write more about visual art and my ability to interact with it another time, but here's what I've got for now. So I finally went. There's a show right now at the Phillips Collection on Pierre-Auguste Renoir, my longtime favorite artist, and I went. I got to see more of his work at one time than I ever have before. And I found myself a new favorite painting among them—not just a favorite out of Renoir's work, but perhaps a favorite among all art I will ever see. The exhibit itself explores the story behind one of Renoir...