Social media and communication

This morning I realized that I’ve got this phone number for five years now and still, I don’t know it by memory. 

This is absolutely strange if you consider that I learned every single number I use by memory in a couple of weeks and till now I still remember the first number I had when I was 13.

After hours of pondering I can give a valid point, this last number came a few months after my first smartphone and this was the cornerstone because a smartphone means a portable internet connection, portable Facebook, Twitter, and email, and of course whatsapp so better connection with the world. 

Once this is achieved, once better technology is available to more people social media becomes the turning point of communication.

I want to be honest, if I have to weigh the number of times I called or been called by phone and the times I get important messages (even job-related) via Facebook or even mail well, let’s say that the phone calls are not even able to move the scale a bit.

Once I realized how social media changed my own way of communication, it is not difficult to understand how they will change everybody in the near future.

I’m not sure and I’ll not like if sim cards will stop to be a thing because we still need a personal space, a way of communicating that we can decide or not share with others but this will still remain small in the relation of the number of people we can reach with social media.

-ldmarchesi

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The antechamber of the oneironaut #1 – Chess & Fights

Dreaming is a fundamental part of human existence, it avoids your absolute madness but dreams can be crazy occasionally.

Sometimes I notice that some of them follow the same path, I’m not talking about one being the sequel of the previous one but the structure is similar plenty of time and it works almost like this:

There is the beginning of the dream where all the characters do their stuff and me with them but it is not the final plot of the dream, they are totally disconnected events.

Then there is the second act where the characters start to position themself where they have to be for the final act.

I don’t wanna lie, is exactly like moving pieces in a chessboard for a chess mate.

The scary thing is that it is not a subtle metaphor for a long movie where clues are disseminated along with the plot, you can literally see the dream characters that reach their final spots like the assault on the proverbial Final fight.

Then is the final act when, like a lightning strike from a clear sky, all the pieces are where they have to be and the attack begins, but not so fast because the dream is ended.

There are generally three different emotions generally, there is the tranquillity at the beginning where everything is playing nice, there is the anxiety in the second act where you know that something is gonna happen but you don’t know what and then the fear where the strike began.

Unfortunately, I never got a happy ending, just always woken up when the barbaric horde buries me under their swipes.

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The three-body problem a Chinese sci-fi masterpiece

The three-body problem is a Chinese hard science fiction book first of the trilogy of the same name.

It is a gigantic opera that tells the story of an alien invasion much different from every other one that we used to see in movies

First of all, and this is what I like in science fiction, it takes into consideration the vastity of space end the fact that traveling in the universe requires lots of time.

Second, it uses the imagination and the scientific knowledge of the author to make the aliens way smarter than pictured in hollywood movies where they are soldiers that attack Earth with powerful weaponized ships for the sake of doing it.

Third and most important in my opinion is the fact that that science in the book has to face the difficulty of politic walls

I believe that the real main character of the story is the Fermi paradox that is, in case you don’t know, a paradox between the lack of evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the high probability that such civilization could exist.

This has a great role in the plot when it shows how our planet is pretty much invisible if somebody is not looking at it after all space is damn empty and big and we are nothing compared to it.

There is even a part in the book that really got my attention: a scientist received this message coming from the closest star (Proxima Centauri), the message says: Don’t answer this message or you will be invaded.

This is so frustrating and fascinating at the same time, the first alien message we receive could lead to an apocalyptic result because the way that we used to create a civilization may or may not be used from other civilizations around the universe.

This book has lots to say about religion too because at some point we can see how humanity would rather be willing to count on a deus ex machina to solve the problems that trying to change the world for ourselves.

I believe that this book helped me a lot in the understanding of how hard science fiction can be flexible that I thought and thanks to it I got lots of ideas on how to improve a sci-fi plot even remaining in the lovely cage of science.

If you are at Netflix addicted like I am there is a high chance that you saw a movie called The wandering Earth so, the book from which the movie has been adapted was written by the same author (Liu Cixin) and if you saw the movie you can perceive how great the stories by this author are.

This book has something in common with another hard science fiction book that I absolutely love that is The Martian by Andy Weir both of them where serialized even though this happens in two totally different ways.

The three-body problem was just published in a journal while The Martian was published on the Author’s blog to get peer review but both of them gathered an enormous success after the serialization and this could lead to a future post about serialized novels.

-ldmarchesi


Related posts:
The Martian – A proper sci-fi opera

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I giving up Facebook for Twitter and here is why

It was 2008 and, during a vacation, a friend of mine told me “Why you don’t give a try to Facebook?”

I had to admit that my first response was: “What the f**k is Facebook?”

Before that, we had MSN that was the closest thing to a social network that we had even though the word social network was not even around.

So the day after I get a try to this new thing and it was addicting since the very beginning, I started to get lots of friend requests from all my friends, it was becoming a good adventure and eventually, it became addictive.

Then Twitter arrived and the best description we had for it was: Is like Facebook but worse.

The difference was tangible, it had a limited amount of characters so it was impossible to write all the poems that we write on Facebook.

But eventually, all the differences started to grow, plus a lot of young people really prefer it.

Now, there is a main difference between the two socials, Facebook is for connecting people and Twitter is instead a sharing idea platform.

Furthermore is easier to connect with people on Twitter, if you need to grow your contact list for any reason, it is way better on Twitter.

The only thing that can be may or may not considered worse than Facebook is that high visibility can be a double sharp edge sword but this only if you feel to have dirty consciousness about what you are trying to say.

I believe even that a contained amount of characters can lead to an improvement in the ideas that you want to share after all a concept has to be as long as it has to be not longer and not shorter.

It was indeed a good adventure where a few months ago I started to post on Twitter regularly, way more than I use to do on Facebook, I got really more interactions (in relation to the number of followers that I have of course).

-ldmarchesi


Some good article:
Twitter, the Land of Bad Bots by DVS Press

 

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Short story #3 – A cosmic highway

There wasn’t a dark sky anymore, all the crew could see from the cockpit the red vastity of the martian landscapes, after months of travel they finally reached the destination.

There were red lights everywhere, it was time to wear the helmet and sit in the cockpit, it was time to descent on the red planet.

Twenty seconds to burn initiation

A cold voice said.

Clair took the com “Here is the Phoenix III to Olympus base, we are ready to ignite the engines”.

They waited, they were entering the atmosphere, the sound of the thin air against the structure of the ship was frightening as if everything should fall in pieces in a matter of seconds.

Copy, we follow your descent from here Igwe replied via com.

In less than ten minutes they would land close to the base where two manned mission was creating the first interplanetary colony.

“You ok Inés?” Tzu asked.

She nodded, she was terrified and she held his hand.

“Almost there,” he said.

When the engines ignite, they felt compressed against their chairs, for ten long minutes, then the parachutes opened, they could see them by the small windows in the cockpit.

They decelerate so much that now they could breathe, unfortunately, wasn’t finished because parachutes weren’t enough so the engine continued till they hurt something, the ship suddenly stopped and the computer said.

Touch down

They were on the surface.

When they opened the hatch, the air went sucked outside.

Clair Blanchard stepped on the red dust and then the crew followed, an astronaut was approaching.

At the moment, 14 people lived in the planetary base after that, eight years before, Captain Igwe was the first human being to step on the planet.

Now, all the three phoenixes were there like spires over an interplanetary species, waiting for the fuel to charge thanks to the martian atmosphere.

An astronaut approach them “I’m Igor Cherenkov, welcome on Mars”

Clair nodded.

“How was your travel?” Cherenkov asked.

“Just a normal space journey, extraordinarily ordinary” she replied, this was her third space mission, the first two was on the moon but this was beyond everything she enrolled for when she entered the fleet.

On the other side, only her second in command Worley wasn’t on his first mission, the other five was doing this for the very first time and Claire passed all the travel comforting their fears like the mother that she never was

The mount Olympus was there in all his mass, Tzu was observing it with interest.

Inés could bet that he would like to hike it, he would hike everything but that wasn’t an ordinary mountain, it was the highest of the solar system, it was 22 km high almost four times the Everest and nobody ever climbed it.

It is easy to say that nobody would do it for a long time because the mission required all the people to help in the base, there wasn’t time for fun at the beginning of the colony, they would have gone there only if science required it.

The dusk was arriving and was almost dinner time, it was an almost self-sustainable society, they were cultivating their food from years, even though that wasn’t a really good time to increase the population of the base.

The crew of the Phoenix III was concerned because, in the last months, they received communications about problems with water.

“We are struggling to find ice. If we don’t and the population increase, we have to abort the mission and come back to Earth” Igwe explained.

“The end of the dream,” Stark said.

Tzu was distant, he was looking at the satellite maps “Maybe under the Olympus mount there is ice”.

Everybody looked at him with a bemused face “Who are you again?” Igwe asked.

“I’m Tzu Chen”

“Are you a geologist?”

“No, she is” he replied pointing Meyer “I’m a doctor”

“How a doctor is able to find ice under a mountain looking sat maps?” Stark asked.

“I have a passion for geology” he replied.

Nobody replied they had to go to sleep, the next day would have been a science day.

Tzu went to his room, where all his stuff was he unpacked a little box and went to his desk, he opened it, inside there was a small device, he activated it and a disturbance noise came from it, a bip was bipping “Is close” he whispered when Inés knocked the door.

“Come in,” he said hiding the device.

“You want to go on the mountain don’t you?”

“Yes, you? You are glowing, you are happy to be here?”

“Yes, you know that the unknown is my thing, I didn’t have anything on Earth anymore”

He nodded “Now go to sleep, will be a long day tomorrow”

**********

A team of five was outside, two rovers left for an expedition to find ice if no, they should have come back on Earth, the fail of the most important mission was imminent.

Once sure that nobody was watching, Tzu activated the device, it was a sort of compass that leads to a place not far from his position, all the other ones were far away concentrated to find rocks.

Tzu kneeled and moved the sand away on a rock with a symbol on it, it was a triangle but he knew that, in reality, it was a row, it was pointing the mountain, he was amused, is like he found what he was looking for.

“Holy shit” an astronaut replied, fortunately, he didn’t see the device but he definitely saw the rock.

“Come here guys, we have a thing”.

They tried to move it but it was deep in the soil, the first act of alien art and it was on a planet where nobody could give a penny about the presence of alien life “How did you found it?” another astronaut asked.

He used a few seconds to find an excuse “I stumbled on it” it wasn’t sure the best excuse ever found it but it worked.

When the other team came back the all converged to the place, they did pictures that they would have sent to Earth, tons of linguists would have work for years and all of this for a triangle, unfortunately, this wasn’t good for Tzu that would have needed time to work on it with his device, but he had a plan, he would have activated his plane in the night where everybody was sleeping.

When the last light switched off he took his suit and went away like a kid that escape home because is under punishment.

The rock was relatively close so he went there and do fast sync then he headed for a rover but Inés was there “What are you doing outside?”

“I needed to do a thing”

“On the rock?” she looked upset

“Yes, my business”

“What businesses you have on Mars?”

She hadn’t time for that so he detached one of the oxygen tubes from her suit “I’m sorry, go inside and stay”

She went inside, but just the time for reattaching the tube than she went outside and she saw a rover that was driving to the mountain so she took a second rover and followed him.

**********

After hours of driving, she reached the rover that was at the beginning of a cave that went deep inside the mountain, the sun was rising.

She entered, she wanted to know what the hell it was going on and, after minutes she reached a gigantic room and she was speechless, it was an alien artifact that filled the whole room and Tzu was operating with it, a metal door shut behind her.

“WHAT IS THIS PLACE?” she screamed because he was behind a bridge that she didn’t dare to cross.

He activated the com You can come close if you want.

She scrolled her shoulders but she gets close, she didn’t dar though to enter in the perimeter of that alien sphere.

“I bet you want answers”

She nodded.

“I’m not from Earth, I arrived on THIS planet thanks to this device decades ago but it wasn’t nothing around, I was millions of years late for the inhabitants of Mars and fifty years too early for humans”

She was shocked.

“Then I used the ship that I bought with me for going on Earth where I worked for the Phoenix project, I needed to come here, I need to come back home”

“Why you ain’t said nothing?”

“Should have I said to humans that I am an alien? You are smart enough to know I couldn’t do it”

“Speaks with them, they will listen”

“They won’t” he replied while activating the ship “Stay behind the bridge when I leave, the machine will be destroyed”

“Wh-Why?”

“Because it unimaginably bends space and time, it requires a quantity of energy that only the bombs under here can generate”

“Bombs?”

“Don’t worry, you’ll be safe” he looked her “Unless you wanna come” he smiled.

“What? Where?”

“Far away” he replied setting a point in the holographic map that suddenly appeared, it was on the other side of the galaxy.

“Why should I come?”

Inés Hidalgo on Earth you have nothing anymore, and the unknown is your thing, I’m offering you the greater adventure”

She smiled, it was like he read her mind in the last weeks “When will I come back”

“There is no way back, is a single way train and it’s leaving,” he said while the machine was activating.

She stepped inside the sphere while Tzu changed his look, it was a blue alien now, humanoid but with a strange blue skin “You’ll love it” and then a light and nothing more.

Literally, a second later, five members of the crew entered the room where nothing was but a singularity that disappeared in seconds.

They didn’t know what to think but then Igwe looked the cave under them, she launched a light and she smiled “Is ice,” she said.

Humanity just found the key point of the Mars colony but nothing could be comparable with the adventures that Inés Hidalgo will live.

-ldmarchesi

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How Coronavirus will change our lives.

While in quarantine for this Covid-19 thing, I had time to think about how this virus will change our lives in the short and long periods.

Starting with the fact that this virus will never pass because since before the first alarms, it was already everywhere.
People traveled from and to China and spread all around the world but is not this the meaning of the post.

Today I want to speak about the legacy that this virus will have worldwide in our lives and because I don’t have any qualifications in order to give my forecast in the matter of politics, economy, or freedom I’ll speak about something that I’m really invested with and that’s Literature.

In older posts, I spoke about how the current experiences that we do, change genres like science fiction.
Twenty years ago, sci-fi was into alien invasions and, even though now there are still more of those, the genre started to diverge in different directions.

There is global warming so we have movies like Interstellar that cover the problem.

There is the overpopulation so we have the Dan Brown Inferno or The infinity saga of the MCU

We start to watch Mars as something that is every day closer so we have The Martian by Andy Weir.

And now, out of thin air, we have this gigantic pandemic virus that is killing thousands and it will stay with our generation for so much time that we will have all the chances to use it in novels, but how this can make a new chapter in science fiction?

It already happened in the past with ebola where we got the movie Outbreak from 1994 with Dustin Hoffman and we have contagion from 2011, a movie with a cosmic cast, and if watched in 2020 can be the closest description of what is happening today.

There is a main difference with the current situation though: That was fiction about a virus that had not made to a pandemic and the Covid-19 is actually our own experience so it will be absolutely easier to create something about it, we don’t have to invent much.

We know that we are forced to stay at home, there is the fear of personal contacts, there are idiots around that don’t follow the rules and risks to cause more problems than we already have, the fear that, even when everything will pass, won’t be really because for years there will be the terror of getting it again.

Furthermore, maybe the most important of them all, the fact that every person can be infected.

You can be a nurse, an old lady, a teenager, the Prime Minister, or the Prince of Wales, if you are a person, you’ll get it.

This virus has a legacy now, it will last for a long time and will have repercussions on the way we see the world today, altogether with the world that we are going to leave to our children.

I guess that what I’m trying to say is that this outbreak changed our lives for good now but, as we always do, we have to use it to learn and improve together instead of getting defeated.

And this can be the best way to craft a story about these years and luckily as with many stories, it will drive future generations to avoid the same mistakes we did.

-ldmarchesi

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The secret life of a plot

What have in common two totally unrelated events? The most reasonable answer is nothing but we can agree that everything is always related.

Writer block is the worse thing that can happen in the creation of a story because the fluidity of the world that is growing inside the blank word file is compromised, it can’t be finished.

Fortunately, a writer is an imaginative machine, able to have small hints from even the smaller seed of an idea, for my point of view is like typing sci-fi on google, going on images and then lots of ideas came along, unfortunately, though they are not the right kind of idea.

They gave me the boost for another totally unrelated branch of the story, is like if you need a robot to be in the right place at the right time in order to save a ship from a bomb placed in his rear engines and you can only think about him fighting an alien that infiltrated the cooling system of the ship.

There is no way that you can put these two moments in a mentally sane timeline even because the robot is investigating something that broke the hyperspace engines days before so the time is ticking and the events are just happening almost at the same time.

And likely this happens minutes after you saw an art concept that allows you to drastically change for the better the ship that you are carefully designing, is the dream of every worldbuilder.

But you know that is the most beautiful part of this gigantic mystery? Somehow the robot is following the alien and they are both going in the direction of the engines, and then when the atoms of the crappy fluid-like alien blob had just been redistributed around because the robot had just pushed it in a perilous place, it needs a way out from that cold place.

At this point, it carefully crawls out a conduit and there it meets the girls with which he needs to save the ship.

Is like a forest, you plant a seed that grows then you plant another seed and then they interconnect growing bigger than ever for the greater ending of a story that just needed the perfect harmony of two moments in time that may be always be meant to collide, is like a plot have its own life, I’d rather say even the result of a great intelligent designer that wanted it.

Or maybe is just a gigantic coincidence, who knows?

– ldmarchesi


Related posts:
Ideas – The bricks of progress
Unintelligent design

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How the voice typing software changed my life!

I recently discovered that writing programs have voice typing in it and that is possible with your voice to write them.
Since I discovered I’m abusing it and I have to say that it changed my life in ways I couldn’t imagine before.
There are three main ways in which diesel software helping me:

Improving English

First of all, it helps me with my English.
One of the most important ways to learn a new language is to speak it.
Unfortunately, there isn’t always a way to speak with somebody so you’ll have to speak with yourself.
Dictating your words to a computer in order to write a blog post or a novel or anything you need to write it gives your speech a purpose.
In addition, the voice typing software requires good pronunciation so you have to constantly improve it in order to type a document that is the most possible correct.

Fight my stammering

In the second place, it helped me with my stammering which is something that is part of me for a lot of time.
The fact of constantly having to speak out what I have to write it helps me fight it.
Unfortunately, this program doesn’t understand stammering speeches so the fact that you have to really improve your speaking is the only way for the software to work

 

Writing speed

In the last place, there is maybe the most important of all the points for a writer.
The speed of writing is the bone of contention of writing forever.
Writers always look for a way to finish the novels ASAP, we started with feathers and ink than we discovered typing machines, pens, computers and every time it was the future.
Now, this is what we should use to create.
You can type thousands of words in a matter of minutes with this method.
This brings to another point the fact that you can literally dictate from everywhere, today a phone is enough so you can do it from the gym, while you walk in the city or in nature.

Unfortunately, this software is not actually perfect in fact this post was totally dated but at the end, I had to do big work of correction Notts total of course but still, it will need improvement however while we are waiting the moment in future where the software will directly take thoughts out of our mind and transform them into novels or even movies, we have to arrange with what we have now.

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Maus – The greatest story about holocaust ever written

In a few days will be the Holocaust memorial day and I don’t need to introduce what this is.

Beyond, a few days ago, I found this graphic novel. My first one actually.

The premise is good: The son of an Auschwitz survivor, passed years collecting his dad’s memories in order to give to the world a compelling anthology about what really happened in that dark period.

The result is a heartbreaking masterpiece, it will enter within the walls of hell itself.

Jewish are mice, Polish are pigs, Americans are dogs, Nazis are cats and the never appeared Israeli Jewish could be porcupines.

At the end of this opera, we are going to understand how easy it can be for us to be unable to really understand what happened back there.

How can we imagine how it is to live in a world where you have to give away friends and relatives in order to survive another day?

How can we imagine how it is to live in a world where one day you have everything and the day after you are a prisoner?

Is it so hard to believe that those things still happen today?

But why this book is so amazing?

Maus has two different timelines

There is the relationship between the Autor and his dad in order to gain as much information as possible, and there is the father himself that tells the story.

You are able in this way to know how life is really drastically changed before the deportation and, after decades, how this affected the life of the survivors.

#Minispoiler
The part that most melted my heart is when the father, have to do a leap of faith giving his trust to other Jewish and, after this, he gets deported with his wife because they betrayed him

Even if, this was about Jewish, Nazis and WWII, I can’t believe that this is so far from what happens now in places like North Korea or China or Gaza or any place where human rights are canceled.

My literature and history teacher used to say this sentence: “History is a good teacher, but doesn’t have scholars” So true!

-ldmarchesi


Related posts:
Mice and men – Universe 25 and the end of humanity

 

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The equinox paradox – A star trek concept

Star Trek Voyager is one of my sci-fi shows ever, is the adventurous homecoming of a ship literally lost in space.

There is a small problem with it, very small: The ship is every day better and more able to travel in space, it doesn’t touch by time, fights and incidents.

I always asked if they could try to solve this problem and no, We have amazing engineers onboard isn’t an excuse.

Fortunately, at a point around the ending of the show, they get the preys of the sci-fi fans and gave us few episodes with the USS Equinox, a small scientific ship that was indeed lost in space but this time was damn in pieces.

Now, the ship was small and they were mostly scientists so they weren’t much able to defend themself in case of attack but on the other side, being on the other side of the Galaxy should give you a disadvantage in the mean of could have replacement parts for a high tech space ship.

This is magnified from a moment in the first episode when Captain Janeway note that they have a certain number of torpedoes and they have to work with them until their homecoming.

From a story like this, the Equinox was the expected final result of how a ship should be at the end of a similar odyssey.

Beyond this, is possible to speak even about the ethical side of the difference between the ships when Captain Janeway criticizes Captain Ransom when she discovers he hasn’t given a fuck about the prime directive.

It’s easy to cling to your principles when you’re standing on a vessel with its bulkheads intact, manned by a crew that’s not starving.

If you read my related post, you should surely know that I’m not a fan of the prime directive.

It is exclusive and not as human as the lore should let us believe.

However, in a group of people trained in the Starfleet, we should expect more considerable confinement on the use of ethic.

Lucky for us, the last episodes of the show gave us some amazing and sentimental loss among the crew… Even do they deleted everything with TIME TRAVEL yerdasellsavon!

I think that time travel is the lazier way to solve the problem in literature, sometimes, someone has to die and this is the best part of the hero’s journey.

-ldmarchesi


Related posts:
Prime directive and lost humanity

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