Richard Crawford's World

Meanwhile... Back in my Brain...

Posted 1 day, 18 hours ago., on Saturday, May 10th, 2008, at 12:19 am
Posted in Writing

I’ve just added a couple of new stories to my website, so please share and enjoy.

First is "writing down some", a story I wrote when I worked at a local newspaper, hating every minute of it, delivering newspapers to the racks and repairing racks whenever they broke down. It really wasn’t that bad a job, but for a first job out of college, it was kind of a disappointment.

Second is a novella called "LTM", which I wrote in 1996. Ah, the mid-90’s. Clinton was President, apocalyptic fervor was rising to new heights with the inevitable breakdown of civilization coming with Y2K, and The X-Files taught a nation to fear the government’s involvement with aliens and black helicopters. Good times. This story is, I admit, cheesy, dated, and in some ways more autobiographical than it probably should be, but I had a blast writing it and plenty of people have enjoyed it. I hope you do too.

Of course I still have "Fookin’ Britches", "Four Ways of Counting Blackbirds", "In the Living Room, a Painting", and "Little Fluffy Wiggletoes" online as well. So feel free to read those if you haven’t already.

Real Life Zombie

Posted 4 days, 8 hours ago., on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008, at 10:03 am
Posted in Maniacs and Morons and Robber Barons

I am, of course, talking about the Clinton campaign. It’s dead but it won’t stop moving around, grasping desperately at votes and delegates like a zombie lunging after brains.

There are plenty of things that bug me about the Clinton campaign, from the unscrupulous way they’re trying to reseat the delegates from states that were told directly that their primary votes wouldn’t count to her castigation of Barack Obama as an "elitist". And it’s kind of sad, too, because there was a time when I wouldn’t have minded Clinton as president. I miss the days of the first Clinton presidency, that eight year long nightmare of prosperity and peace which Bush brought an end to. There was a time when I thought Hillary Clinton would have done as well as her husband as President. Now she’s coming across to me as desperate and sort of creepy. And while tenacity and determination are good qualities for a President to have, that’s not what Clinton’s displaying.

But what I think saddens me the most about the Clinton campaign is the good will that she’s losing, especially among the Democrats and the Obama supporters who would have once been happy with Clinton as President. With her snipes and jabs, she’s squandering that good will, calling Obama an elitist — a term I’m not convinced is actually an insult — and continuing to press on about Reverend Wright, an issue that many voters in many polls have indicated just doesn’t matter to them. And while politics is never a clean game, the filth isn’t supposed to drip from a campaign like bits of flesh and grave dirt from a shambling zombie. She’s alienated many Obama supporters, plenty of whom are convinced at this point that she wouldn’t be any better a President than McCain, who has all but promised more of the sort of nonsense the Bush administration has brought us.

I suppose it’s possible that Clinton might make a comeback. After all, we’ve already seen McCain’s campaign shuffle back into life after it was declared DOA just a year ago. Clinton’s challenge, then, if she beats Obama to the nomination, will be convincing the public, including all of the alienated Democrats she’s created, that she’s not actually a Republican.

I don’t hold out much hope.

Posted 16 days ago., on Friday, April 25th, 2008, at 12:45 pm
Posted in robot overlords

The German engineering company Festo has created some lovely robot minions that I’m sure every person with dreams of becoming an evil overlord will want to purchase and implement right away..

First, robotic jellyfish.  These guys can communicate with each other, seek out energy stations to recharge themselves when their energy supply is low, and more. Watch them in action:

There’s also this critter, which is sort of the aerial version of the robotic jellyfish. It’s surprisingly graceful to watch as it flies through the air:

Says Festa, "Using a peristaltic movement to drive a balloon was previously unknown in the history of aviation. The AirJelly is the first indoor flying object to use such a peristaltic propulsion system. The jellyfish glides gently through the air thanks to this new drive concept based on the reaction thrust principle." In other words, it really IS a flying jellyfish. A robotic flying jellyfish. A BIG robotic flying jellyfish. Coming to get you. And there’s something vaguely Matrix-ish, if not outright Lovecraftian, about these guys.

Every up and coming dark overlord needs to have these robot jellyfish, both aquatic and aerial, in their minion army.