Finally an update

When I started this blog, over a year ago, I made a post telling the story of how I came up with the name a quarter of a centurty earlier, and another one describing the outlines for the stories I had thought of writing. But then, though I finally started writing the first chapter for the first one, I didn't have time to do any further writing and hence didn't post anymore on the blog either. It wasn't that I had a writer's block or anything similar; it's just that all this time, my life has become far more complicated than it was before my dad passed away unexpectedly in late 2024, leaving me to take care of my mother (who just turned 92 earlier this year) and the household all by myself. It's proven to be quite a challenge, and while so far, I've managed to prove I'm up to it, it's been harder than I had expected.

I've never stopped thinking about all these stories, I've kept polishing the details, and even revising some of the ideas I had considered earlier for the plot, replacing them with others that make better sense and still fell right in place within Issac Asimov's Robots/Empire/Foundation universe. But all that work has been going on mostly inside my own mind, sadly lacking the time to put it in writing. I keep saying I need a secretary. Or an understanding wife. Well, the next best thing might be an AI, and so I began discussing my ideas with a couple of them, mostly late at night, when I'm done with my various chores around the house, before I go to bed and get some much needed sleep. Even so, I still didn't get to further avance typing the first chapter of the first story up to a point where I could publish it here and move to  the next one.

This year, after a complete year without any updates had already elapsed, I thought I might expand the blog's reach and include other things in it so that I could finally post more often (or rather, post at all), coming up with a list of things I had finished (or mostly) which I could include in it:

• my old USENET parody "Star Trek 8: The Rescue of Kirk", written in late 1995 (before Star Trek: First Contact came out), after being disappointed with "Star Trek: Generations". It includes several jokes we used to tell among fellow Star Trek fans in those days. It also has some errors I overlooked until AFTER I had already posted it online. I could correct them when I will post every chapter here on the blog, but I prefer to leave it like that to preserve it in its original condition, maybe adding some notes after them.
• my draft for a book titled "Hyperdimensional Geometry: A Primer for Sci-Fi and RPG Geeks and Nerds", on which I've also been working for several years now, although I have no idea if anything would ever be interested in reading it. I'm an engineer, not a mathematician, but I have an inherent ability to visualize things in my mind, even in more than 3 dimensions. And having notices some misconceptions in works dealing with such matters, I decided I should educate people so that further repetitions of those mistakes can be prevented. I have several manuscript notes, and have already created several graphics to accompany the text, both using bitmapped graphics and vector ones.
• my idea for a movie script stitching together Stanley G. Weinbaum's "Van Manderpootz" stories and "Pygmalion's Spectacles" into a single, coherent story. Weinbaum had an amazing abilty to forsee events which happened several decades later with accurate precision, and I've always thought his stories should reach a larger audience.
• and last but not least, the proposed storyline for "Indiana Jones and the Wahnsinnberge" (aka the Mountains of Madness), an old-style point-and-click adventure game I had started planning sometime between 15 and 20 years ago. Back then, LucasArts hadn't been releasing adeventure games anymore, and the Indiana Jones movie franchise lay dormant, so there where several such fanmade adventure games dealing with Indiana Jones' further adventures under development by different groups of people..But before I could start doing any other work past the story outline and searching, they decided to revive the movie franchise, and blocked any fanmade games from further development by sending them Cease and Desist letters, and so, I decided to just place it in hybernation.

 

 (Oh, and I definitely should also include in my list "Mr. Overlord and Mr. Squid: The Completely Unauthorized Biography of Dicktor Van Doomcock and Harvard J. Cthulhu", a fictional research work meant to finally sole the long-lasting debate about certain genealogical claims related to both of the aforementioned individuals...)

So, be on the lookout for more updates here on the blog over the next days. Last week I spent several days putting AI to good use, helping me arrange the dialogues for "Indiana Jones and the Wahnsinnberge". Last Saturday, I went to bed by 7:30am after finally typing "THE END", although today I thought of some changes in the prologues which would improve the story, and tonight, right before posting all this and heading to bed I finished writing them. So, now I can actually add the phrase "Coming soon to a blog near you"...