Well, there are two things, the first is that I got a workable idea to a final twist in ‘Exhaurire vitam’ the mini series that predominantly plays in New Orleans. There are a few scenes in other places, but the bulk is there. There are a few more issues that I uncovered in ‘How to assassinate a politician’, as such I have it close to ready, a movie and a mini series. Then there was the series ‘Kenos Diastima’, I have been tossing and turning on that and I feel that leaving it (for now) with an open ending at season three is the best way to go. Then I got another idea, this one was initially for ‘Exhaurire vitam’, yet the new series (the one I talked about a few times), has more traction with it and it opens up a nice can of worms. You see, the gods are all over all places, so there much have been some dependency. So what happens when one of them is in debt, or better stated, what happens when the debt was opened to a new source? That was the setting I contemplated on the subway. As such the main character would be open to all kinds of other things. That was the setting my mind worked on. And as I contemplated what could be possible when Bastet is thrown in the mix, the equation changed and that has long repercussions, not bad ones, but unforeseen ones and that tends to be good, because the unforeseen brings more than a surprise or a plot twist, it gives the story a new direction and I am all about that. But in part I have no idea why the images are coming to me so rapidly and so directly, that is the part that has me confused. It is like your brain playing some year at Hogwarts and you create the setting, but you never created the stage. In this example we all know it is J.K. Rowling. But the stage I create is new, has never ben contemplated, or written about. I have no idea where it all is coming from, so for now I follow the thoughts and create more stories and optionally more scripts. And I have no idea where it all goes. Even as I seek the implementation of Saudi TV in the movie, I wonder where it will end. So whilst I get that “Bryan Fogel says Netflix, Amazon and others wouldn’t buy ‘The Dissident’ because they were scared of angering Saudi Arabia” my story does EXACTLY the opposite and as such might be loved there, what I do not get is why not more are considering that step. In the end, good business is where you find it and basically I found it. 3 TV series, one movie, a game, console settings and the evolution to another 50 million consoles and beyond that I reengineered several Ubisoft games and created several 5G IP. Not bad for one person in less than 5 years. So if you are wondering what stops others doing the same, I have no idea. But I do believe that they are all looking in the wrong direction and I feel that more and more of that is proven. But the confusion stays. What if this is all between my ears? I do not believe that this is so, but if you cannot look at it from opposition from a distance than it means you have gone bonkers, have gone round the bend. Oh, and I also designed a weapon to get rid of the Iranian navy, so there (and that part is already online). But the confusion stays. I have no idea what is driving this all. Perhaps a last knee jerk action by the brain before it stops? Your guess is as good as mine, I am honestly clueless.
Category Archives: Stories
The missing ingredient
We all have that. It does not matter whether it is food, drinks, series, movies, games. When an ingredient is missed, it counts, especially when it is an ingredient we thought highly of. In Assassins Creed it became Ezio Auditore. In Tekken it was your favourite character, in NCIS for some it was Tony DiNozo, for Charmed it was Shannen Doherty. And movies have their own crosses to bare (or was that bear?). Anyway, these thoughts came up as we lost Fred Ward to Eternity. I saw him first in Escape from Alcatraz. I always considered hm a good actor and I enjoyed watching his works, especially tremors. But my mind suddenly set on Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, which was shown in the Netherlands as Remo: Unarmed and Dangerous. There are a few issues with this movie. It would be the first time I saw Kate Mulgrew (Captain Janeway of the USS Voyager). It was not the greatest film made, but it had humour, which made the movie fun to watch. Joel Grey as Master of Sinanju Chiun was slightly too much over the top, but still fun. What was interesting was the plot. There we see an investigation of a corrupt weapons procurement program within the US Army. You see, that plot was new, or at least I had not seen it before and then the cogs started turning. Why does Netflix buy these rights and overhaul it into a mini series? You see a movie is nice, but 4-8 one hour episodes leading to a much larger, deeper and darker story might be a lot more rewarding in the long haul. And lets face it with the non functional weapons out there (USS Zumwalt, most of the Russian tanks) the setting for a large increased plot theme (especially when we pull the EU (Strasbourg) front and centre, the story could be appealing to a much larger audience, of course we will miss Fred Ward as a key ingredient, but nature tends to be unrelenting in these matters.
It is after-all about the weapons procurement program, and the stage where someone walks away with billions on a model that never went anywhere is a nice touch. It is even better if some elements are kept as close to the truth as possible. You see, Forbes gave us (at https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/10/30/an-82-year-old-is-suspected-of-decades-long-scam-selling-dangerous-weapons-parts-to-us-military/) ‘An 82-Year-Old Is Suspected Of Decades-Long Scam Selling Dangerous Weapons Parts To U.S. Military’, then there is ‘Metallurgist admits faking steel test results for US Navy subs’ (at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59186655) and there is more where that came from, but consider the second part, consider the idea that the North Koreans (and Russians get a hold of that and a list of Los Angeles attack class submarines that have that steel? Now consider the play that could be made to get a submarine to a specific location and scuttle it ‘accidentally’ because the flaw was unknown. The story that some could write might keep the TV audience on the tip of their seat for the entire mini series, and the bulk of that work was already done. So as Netflix is trying to cut cost, here is an idea that they could use. But I think that they owe it to Fred Ward to have his picture somewhere (as an admiral) or as a father pic of the hero of that story, there are all kinds of ways where we can have a silent tip of the hat to a person who should not be forgotten like yesterdays news, but that applies to so many actors, I will be happy to admit that. When you know your games and consider Sir Alec Guinness as the CEO of Tri-Optimum, you know exactly what I mean. A simple setting of a series done in a few hours, Netflix get to work!
Useful unregistered IP
This is the stage I (and others) are at times set to. You see, I needed an alternative to keeping my IP in house, in house is data at rest and people will get to it, large companies have no scruples when it comes to profit and some are a lot more desperate than others. So I had to create a place where no one would look and I went to a place where EVERYONE looked. The safest place is often underfoot. This is not a place I created, someone created this setting for me. If I was a betting man, I would think it was the Russian Mafia and one of them was a photographing enthusiast.
He (or she) was good enough to have it on the dark web under the eyes of the NSA for a long time. In the end I have no knowledge if he ever got caught, but the idea was really good, and I stumbled upon it by pure accident. That person, or someone connected to him made the error of placing the photoshop PSD online. If it had been a JPG file, I would never have been the wiser. But it was a photo of the Kremlin. I was looking for a different building and no matter how you set it, the Kremlin is a beautiful building, as is the grand mosque of Riyadh. It does not take an architect to admire the beauty of a building. One does not need to be from San Francisco to admire the Transamerica Pyramid. So there I was looking at the Kremlin in Photoshop. And I suddenly noticed something, in JPG I would have missed it. There was a second magenta level. One was #FF00FF, the second one was #FF02FF and that layer had morse code.
Now consider a photo, 6720 × 4480 and morse is merely one pixel high. I can easily hide 60 lines in there without anything or anyone picking it up, the eyes cannot differentiate a pixel that is #ff02FF instead of #FF00FF, and if you have two layers. One in Magenta, One is Cyan #02FFFF added to #00FFFF and they end up in a JPG, you have a novel way of hiding a text, especially when it is morse and especially if the only way is to merge #FF02FF and #02FFFF into a combined layer. Consider that and consider
“.. -. ….. –. – …. . .-. . .- .-. . – .– — -.. .. — . -. … .. — -. … – …. .- – .- .-. . .. –. -. — .-. . -.. –..– — . .-. . .-.. -.– -… . -.-. .- ..- … . – …. . – . .-.. . -.-. — — -.-. — — .–. .- -. .. . … .. –. -. — .-. . – …. . -. . . -.. — ..-. – …. . -.-. — -. … ..- — . .-. … .-.-.-“, now consider that this line is one pixel high, I could add 120 lines on each picture and I am smart enough to only place the JPG in a place where 27,000,000 people roam, over all the boards, 3 sets of 4 dozen pictures does not even raise an eyebrow and as the images are not upsetting anyone, no one cares. I never uploaded them from anywhere I worked or lived. So good luck finding them, but on July 30th those images get a reduced limelight and that is the start of a race where some Americans are not invited. They had their chance and now lets see how some treat free IP, will they adhere and respect the consumer or will they make the same mistake?
It was my way out, live or die, my IP will survive and it optionally will land in hands willing to keep the options open. Others had their options and were willing to make the bet that they could outthink me. But when you see where they would not look, because the margins were expected to remain low, how does that make them worthy of billions? You see, when you’ve never had that, you will never miss it and like others I have pride and I have ego and I find Microsoft unworthy, especially after they betrayed the gaming community (as I personally see it) after they got whipped by Nintendo in gaming (Nintendo Switch) after they got handed their guts with the Surface (Apple iPad) and soon after Adobe slaps them silly and take away their Powerpoint market. After Amazon removes their cloud presence in business and gaming. Why should they be allowed to live longer? They failed in 4 markets, isn’t that enough to ignore them?
Now I am making sure that they cannot claim any of my IP as I set it to an encrypted setting on the internet. And without those logs they remain clueless. I might never be rich, but I’ll have the last laugh and if Amazon catches on what Microsoft missed in META, they will be reduced to a third world IT company that will leave the top 10 of wealth players before 2030. There is only so much failure that they can adjust for, and we get it things go wrong “Uninstall Windows 11 KB5012643 if it crashes your apps”, I personally reckon that proper testing might have prevented a lot, but that might merely be me. We need to consider what we do and even as the US department of Defense trusts them, it does not mean that we need to make that same mistake. In all this, the useful unregistered IP was a way to keep my IP free from certain hassle and it was needed, especially as I find that time is running out and as more and more companies are getting weirdly nervous and greed driven to obtain more and more revenue. Microsoft is not alone, but it is the most visible one, partly due to all the corrections that Microsoft marketing needs to make on a global setting. So I rely on unregistered IP to keep mine decently safe and it is underfoot of a few players who never considered to look where everyone else was looking, they only needed the right pair of shades to see what needed to be seen. Are you catching on yet?
We need to change the way we think, or we become truly lost.
Like a whisper
My mind took me back to the first dream (that I described in ‘Elements of whatever’ yesterday). It was the setting and the setting was incomplete. I saw the two lanes, like esplanades going over the length of the town, parallel, but the road furthest away from the gorge was higher. Both streets had an abundance of tavern like cafe’s. There were all kinds of small shops in between, some selling books, some sold knick knacks and they were always next to a tavern. Filled with people talking, chatting and various kinds of idle conversations. The tables had coffee, they had some kind of wine, but much sweeter like grape juice. Fruity. People were having snacks, mostly breadsticks, some peppered. And I saw a boy run calling for its mother. At first I thought it as me, but my mother died decades ago. The road went on and swivelled towards houses, dozens of houses. Some look like log cabins, most looked like old fashioned French stone houses. Like they were build in the 18th century. The view was magnificent, like an image of Chicken Itza, but no ruins in the background. No roads and no noise. That was the missing part, the part of the noise that is at present EVERYWHERE. It took me a long time to figure it out. The zeppelins are not merely methods of moving, they are the only ones who can move there. Like Asia and South America. The people (the wealthy ones) had enough of the pollution, the seas washing the land away and the people hindering them. I wonder if this is part of Keno Diastima? It is possible, but I cannot tell at present. The land in some places will truly gain value. Land that is now seen as worthless, but it has something high priced land does not. It has CLEAN AIR, and it lacks people. Gated communities that cannot be reached by anything else than a zeppelin. Planes cannot land there, ships cannot get close and car cannot reach these places. The ultimate gated community. Places where there is no fear of war as it I away from everything the greed driven desire, certain players have removed themselves from the game and they are living out there lives surrounded by the things they care for. A book, a drink and a conversation with like minded people.
So what is this a part of?
I am not certain yet, but if I am correct, these places will come up like mushrooms. Gated places protected and absent of what some would call the Riff-raff. Crime is dealt with directly and with deadly force, these people paid for protection and anyone stupid enough to try their luck will find themselves dealt with like the pirates of old.
It is a larger setting and it is a setting that is highly speculative, not real, optionally the setting of a story, but consider the places. Warm places where heating is not needed. Enough light to fuel solar banks and the zeppelins bring provisions and people. A new iteration of cogs, isolated from all the other worries. Some villages in tropical places and some in places where people enjoy the snow, absent of a lot of people. Can you honestly say that in a place with 8,000,000,000 that they all enjoy each others company?
Filed under Stories
Elements of whatever
Another dream, but this time it I different. I had part of this dream before. It did not make sense then and it does not now. Now is even more confusing. The stage is two fold. First the now, because I fear it will leave my mind quickly. I am not sure if it is for. Story, a script, a game or just isolation. I am at the transfer of Dutch KLM. The KLM desk is for a different plane, much larger. There is a PX store. I show a regimental image. I want that shield. I mention that a friend was there. The PX store shows me some wannabe self centred piece of crap. He states to me that the commander of that battalion was a traitor and as such he refuses to give me the shield. OK, I respond, I will talk to the press and ask for clarifications. The man signals another. That man tells me to come with him, with his hand menacing in the jacket. I was holding orange peels from an Orange I just ate. I squeeze them and the peels spray. I merely say ‘Biological!’ And I am gunned down.
The event is trivial. I suddenly remember the boarding area, almost like a rocket launch from another dream. I pretended to be diplomatic staff. The plane seemed weirdly large. I have been on 747-400, this seemed a lot larger. In the previous flight it was from somewhere in Asia to South America. This I do not know. But the plane stuck. The boarding area stuck. The story seems to matter, there seems to be levels of arrogance, levels of over the top elevation in the boarding areas and it was all linked to Dutch KLM planes. Even now I am starting to remember other elements of the previous dream. The walls were like glass when I looked at them with glasses. They were from some metal. The plane was almost like a Hindenburg on steroids. The plane was like a small town. Like the shop area on a passenger liner. Rooms with chairs, two wide, by the windows, overlooking where we flew. In the Asian part it was overlooking beautiful green forests, mountains and a lot of oceans. It all seemed so peaceful. There are remembrance moments of ‘Murder on the Zinderneuf’ a who dunnit game based on a zeppelin. I wrote about that in ‘Shadows are Us’ (and a few other places), in this setting I wrote about a change to gaming (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/05/31/shadows-are-us/) which I wrote about n May 2021. This is not entirely the same. My mind is wondering if a return to the days of the zeppelin is too wrong a concept. The idea was abandoned during the marshmallow clambake of May 6, 1937, when the Hindenburg burned down. But that was in the era of Hydrogen, later we got Helium, but the need for speed overshadowed everything. Now, in a stage when we can ALWAYS be connected, we can work everywhere. Is speed really essential? We can all understand that we need presence in places at times. But how we get there is another matter. With the era of 3d printing, light weight shops and a more essential setting of what matters during flights, Consider the image below and the way the materials were made.
Now we can have twice the strength at only half the weight making a zeppelin much more effective. The top of the zeppelin could have large solar cell panels fuelling batteries and the propellors pushing the zeppelin forward. Did anyone reconsider what a Zeppelin could achieve, especially with todays abilities? Even now Titanium is heavier than aluminium, yet you need a lot less Titanium to get the same strength as Aluminium. The stage is all over and the need for a reduced carbon print (or was that a bacon foot print) is out there. So why do we not look at the old ides and how we can offer a renewed idea for getting to places. It is just an idea and it was in parts fuelled by a game as well as its optional newly launched version on Amazon Luna, but I am genuinely surprised that no one has taken up the baton, why is that? I am no airplane designer, so why is this path abandoned?
There might be reasons that mediocre me had not considered, I am willing to accept that, but the dream was weird and it came twice around. Even now the first dream comes back in waves even as the second one faded away.
So is Helium a solution, or merely an element of whatever and no one gives a fig? I honestly do not know, but I do really like the idea of a steampunk version of the Zinderneuf, I really do.
And then there were three
This story starts a bit flaky. It started a little while ago, but today I saw Morbius and that clicked with a few other thoughts. The movie was OK, it was not great but I never read those comics, so I went in blind. The acting was good, the special effects were nice and there are two disadvantages, the first that it come across as an origin story and the second is that I never read those comic books. As such, I believe that those who read those comics are a much better source of criticism. Yet still it gave me food for thought, food from sources decades ago. You see it takes me back to the comic Dracula.
I was not the biggest fan, I read a few, not all and one thing stood by me. At the end of one of these stories Dracula says “You forgot, even demon’s have nightmares, in those nightmares it is me they see”, it is not a literal translation, but it comes close. You see, we think that the darkness is scared of the light, it is not, it fears a deeper darkness. You see if it was the light they feared there would have been an outright war between forces of light and forces of dark. But the dark fears a deeper darkness, it is where they cannot see, that is where their fears lie. This fear goes back to the age that preceded ancient Greece. And that is where I am now (to some degree).
Part 0
It was a sunny Sunday and I have been living is relative quiet for some time. He had been living in London for a few months now and most of the day, hours in the morning, the afternoon and the evening he was bend over a book he had received. In-between these moments he went to the foodcourt in Harrods, walked on Regent street and let the noises of London infest him. It brought a lull to his mind that he rather enjoyed. Day after day reading Ἐλευσίνια Μυστήρια’ (see Another episode) was taking its toll. He had read as much as he could on Eleusis, he had studied maps, he had even been digging into the stories of Demeter and the search for her daughter. A much larger setting that had connections all over, but he was not able to see them yet. There were links to longevity of the Eleusinian Mysteries, with connections to a consistent set of rites, ceremonies and experiences that spanned millennia, and it all seemingly came from psychedelic drugs. The problem here was that the drugs were unknown, or at least they were not in the book, making matters a little bit of a problem. There was in addition the small sentiment that Eleusís, seemed to be Pre-Greek, and that name was inclined to be linked to the goddess Eileithyia. A daughter of Zeus and Hera, but if the town was pre-Greek, there was more to all this and that was a rather large damper to the party, because what was still in existence that was pre-Greek? He was about to give up when he walked into the British Museum. He was walking and taking in the art it displayed when he noticed something, he was about to walk away when something within him told him to look deeper. He was staring at the the roaring lion from King Nebuchadnezzar and he suddenly noticed two words in there. It was faint, it as in the mortar and it was behind the stones. He had to stare longer to make the words out, The words were Eleusís and Nabu. Nabu was known to him, he was Mesopotamian, not Greek, what was the daughter of Zeus and Hera doing there?
As clues go, it was slither thin, but between thin and nothing he would take thin any day and now he had a new path to walk on. Where would it lead?
Part 1
To be continued…
Yes, it needs continuation and this is not a cliffhanger. It was as far as I got. You see, if despair opposes hope, what drives either? Consider a simple clock, the cogs that make the seconds move and form a circle in EXACTLY 60 seconds, now consider the minutes that are pushed one part forward every t60 seconds and 60 minutes later an hour will have passed. The setting of a clock. Now set that machine up to reflect hours, days, months moon setting (28 days) and years. A clock that does not ever stop and has been precise for millennia. That is the clock we need to find, because the Olympians have no concept of mortality. They are here forever, and that drives both despair and hope. You see a person that never fears anything has nothing to look forward to, that person is merely passing time. Eternity is the harshest taskmaster we could ever fear to face. And we must fear eternity, the Olympians certainly did. And there is the rub, there is the setting. If Eleusís is the goddess of childbirth, who is one the other end? Not the fates, not Hades and no one knows who is there and that is the setting towards a path we find ourselves on.
Filed under Stories
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 