And its September once again…

Where did time go?

Summer went by like a gush of wind and all its left are the tingling sensations in your skin, memories of what you felt in that brief moment in time.

It’s back to work now. Full time. Full projects. Full schedule. Plenty of deadlines. Some projects and wishes too. Fall is nearing by, with leafs lavishing the ground and stripping down the trees for the cold weather that starts to blow over us. Summer’09 is nearly a memory of the past. Good memories. Very good indeed.

Sure… the wall isn’t painted yet…

Sure… it was not enough…

Of course it could have been more…

But it was unique alright. And for that a treasure to keep.

Perhaps the end was more nostalgic then I wished it to be so. But in perspective it was inevitable to feel blue with the days passing and the realization of what was to come clearer every day.

It’s now over an year that Pumpkin & I met in-world. Over an year since we hooked up unofficially… and 53 weeks since we officially partnered inworld. That’s a whole year plus some spare days. It doesn’t feel like that long… but it also feels like it has been like that since ever.

We ended up hardly doing anything to celebrate the day with all the blues hitting us with the incoming summer vacations end… it was a pity actually… we did spend a hell of a great Summer and even feeling like an ephemera sensation, it marks a point in time I’m proud of.

Let’s see what time will hold for us in the meantime…

Afterall, from what I’ve heard… each year that goes by tends to hold an individual package of Summer inside.

Summer’s Almost Gone – The Doors

Summer’s almost gone,
Summer’s almost gone,
Almost gone,
Yeah, it’s almost gone.
Where will we be
When the summer’s gone?

Morning found us calmly unaware,
Noon burned gold into our hair,
At night we swam at laughin’ sea
When summer’s gone, where will we be?
Where will we be?
Where will we be?

Morning found us calmly unaware,
Noon burned gold into our hair,
At night, we swam at laughin’ sea
When summer’s gone, where will we be?

Summer’s almost gone,
Summer’s almost gone.
We had some good times,
But they’re gone,
The winter’s comin’ on,
Summer’s almost gone.

I don’t like shopping nor do I care much about fashion… however, being in SL somehow awaken in me a new perspective of myself…

So, I do like shopping and I do like fashion to a certain extent… eh, go figure… anyway… my babe’s a expert shopper and helps me out picking out nice pieces that blend well together. Since there aren’t many good male shopping advices out there, I thought I’d give it a go. So, here’s my 5 cents.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/petrosmiklos/3827826892/

Outfit Details:
Hair: =IZUMIYA= Hair&Black Knit
Eyes: -Belleza- Eyes Magic Emerald B
Skin: >TRUTH< Francois [tan] [C]
Piercings: .:CoLL:. Charisma Lip/Nose Piercing Set
Necklace: M.R.M. Dog Tag #02
Shirt: *SL* V Neck Shirt Seal Brown 4
Pants: *SL* The Dude:Jeans Wrecked Darkblue
Sandals: Kalnins Sandals – Earthshine

Notes: Hair & Piercings were a free gift from DSN network. Shape was homemade along with plenty of input from my pumpkin fashion adviser

I don’t know much about art. I either like it or I don’t. That’s it essentially. Pollock’s paintings (above and below) are, from what I’ve gathered the subject of high praise and much debated arguments on whether that is art or just blots of paint on a canvas that a monkey could do too. Of course… there’s the argument that a monkey could indeed do art too which would raise quite a few interesting questions, but that’s not my point.

Personally… On the surface I don’t see much on these painting. Reading a book that by chance brought these painting in to discussion made me curious about them and somehow open my eyes to look at them with a different perspective.

No… I don’t see a pink elephant blissfully jumping from lily-pad to lily-pad on these, not no ulterior interpretation of Humanity struggle to overcome their meaningless trifling. It does however makes me wonder about time and life.

I often used to see the World in a stylized black and white painting. Good and Evil. Right or Wrong. Yay or Nay. Eh… so much for those simple times. Now its all a blur of grays. Hard to see where Pure White or Pure Black exist… they might be there, maybe I just need to look harder… maybe not.

Time on the other hand. Well… it keeps running. You may have noticed it yourself. Were I a super-hero (or villain) and had the possibility to choose my special power I would pick the power to stop or manipulate time. Just the idea of being able to freeze a moment in time… *sigh*… it would be indescribable.

Problem is, that’s not the way the game’s played. You’re thrown in to the deep end and the clock is ticking. Sure, you’ll make bad decisions, you’ll never grasp the bigger picture, you’ll miss important events or hints that flash by you. Opportunities are flying by you as you go… You either grasp them or you don’t… You might do well… you might end up worst…

Is there a pause? Is there a goal? Is there a pattern we’re missing? Am I missing it? Or is it not there, everywhere we look?

Hmmm… I can almost feel that I can grasp it (whatever it may be) sometimes. I never can though, at least so far. I doubt I ever will. I could keep making plans, re-assecing opinions, decisions, objectives and so on… where would I end up? Eh… I think John said it right in one simple sentence:

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

So I look again at these apparently confusing paintings and I wonder again: Are they random burst of a mad man delusion… or are they just a depiction of the nature of time and life? Yes.. it looks chaotic, its erratic and extremely complex. However… it somehow works. There’s order within the chaos. There’s beauty even.

Guess we just don’t see the bigger picture.

But… if we did…

Would we understand it and appreciate it?

I’m not one to normally trash other people’s work… unless it really does annoy me, but this so called “Sci-Fi” and “Fantasie” Grid Wide Hunt… c’mon, you got to be kidding me!!!

Science fiction is a genre that involves (amongst many other things) the impact of scientific developments in society, which leads to such brilliant things as robots taking over Humanity, space ships, time-travel, aliens and so many other things…

Fantasy is even more broader (even Science fiction is a type of fantasy), though its generally used to coin a particular genre of fantastic medieval stories, ussualy involving dragons, fairies, knights, sorcerers and so on…

THIS hunt… well… it is Fiction alright… but not Science nor Fantasy.

Truth be told I’ve only been to 1/3 of the locations… so there’s hope an actual Sci-fi or Fantasy store may pop up… (Ok… I’ve seen 2 or 3 sort of sci-fi stores already … out of 30!!) But really… couldn’t they choose a PROPER name for a hunt instead of a misleading name?

*sigh*

With so many great fantasy & science fiction stores in SL… how did they come up with *these* … places? Seriously… It’s awful… avoid it. Unless you’re hunt addict and you have done ALL the other hunts going on this month…. and even so… hmmm, I’d give it a second thought.

So I’ve sayeth.

.

PS: in case you still want to check it, you might want to check out Lexi Vargas blog, where he’s been compiling a hint list for this particulary hunt.

A rendering of virtual personas or a projection of real emotions?

I have little doubts about it.

I know I haven’t been writing much around here, mea culpa I suppose. All things considered life is going pretty well indeed. Lot of unexpected unfolding events, who knows which others are bond to come my way? Eh… Life sure takes curious turns. I can’t imagine how my life would be if roughly an year again I hadn’t met her… probably would still be the same ol’ same… dull and gray, with fake blobs of color… maybe… guess I’ll never know now, will I? Fact is… its hard to live and/or even just imagine living without you around me…

The way you look at me. The way you make me feel. The way you love me. How being apart breaks you apart. How my life is duller away from you. How I count the minutes away from you and look forward in time, waiting and hopeing…. It’s harder everyday to be apart… it doesn’t seems to exist such a thing as too much time…

I had another song in my mind, but I’ve posted it before already – The Look of Love -  so I’ll put another one instead, A Case of You.

Hmmm… I got a case… a case of you…

A Case of You

Just before our love got lost you said
“I am as constant as a northern star”
And said, “Constant in the dark
Where’s that at?
If you want me I’ll be in the bar”

On the back of a cartoon coaster
In a blue TV screen light
I drew a map of Canada
Oh Canada
And your face sketched on it twice

Oh you are in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and you taste so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you darling
Still I’d be on my feet
I’d still be on my feet

Oh I am a lonely painter
I live in a box of paints
I’m frightened by the devil
And drawn to those who ain’t afraid
I remember when you told me
“Love is touching souls”
Surely you touched mine
Part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time

You are in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and you taste so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you
I could drink a case of you darling
Still I’d be on my feet
I’d still be on my feet

I met a woman
She had a mouth like yours
She knew your devils and your deeds
She said
“Go to him, stay with him if you can
But be prepared to bleed”
You are in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and you taste so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you darling
Still I’d be on my feet
I’d still be on my feet

Life is full of changes. I end up undergoing a few even if I claim not to enjoy change that much. In the past weeks… well, two months almost since my last post, many changes took place, small or not so small, who can tell? I’d been eager to write but failed to find time or inspiration to do so, so… this will end up short but at least it will come out, as a smoke sign that this blog is still kicking… or at least dragging itself

Anyway, I went to watch Carmina Burana a few weeks ago. It was nice and a differente evening. You can hear the full concert (from another orquestra & choir & location) below.

- Lyrics here -

Besides that… well… life takes its turns, that’s for sure. Some we have no power over them, other we do. After over 13 months working at Sweethearts Jazz Club in SL I gave up my job as a host there (I was one of the oldest ones still working there). It was kind of sad and I’d been dragging that decision over and over… but eventually it was the right thing to do. It no longer felt like fun and only as work for me lately. I didn’t like that. When I first started there, the money was much less and I worked much longer hours… but it ended up being more rewarding. This of course is also due to my own personality I guess, ‘cuz I tend to prefer small intimate places other then large big and crowded venues. Plus, my RL work was cramping me free time and it was a constant struggle to get home and spend two hours there when I had so much else to do.

*Sigh*

Anyway… I’ve met lots of interesting people working there at Sweethearts. Made a few friends. Learned a few things. About me… about others. It was a worthwhile experience… and looking back, I feel much more relieved having left it. I wasn’t doing a great job anymore, just punching the card and the keyboard… new blood will surely do a better job then I was doing in these final months I worked there.

Aside from that FreeLife Magazine has been on a way extended hiatus for… pfff…. way too long. Not that I would have much time to write from them though Yet, I miss writing for them. It was such a cool experience… oh well, like the opening from Carmina Burana says… “O Fortuna, like the moon, you are changeable, ever waxing and waning;” Such is one’s life, new things arriving, old ones vanishing… eh…

Hmmm…. anyway talking about RL, a few twists and turns happen there too.

I got my own car now Its neat. Still getting used to the idea though. My personal life is also taking unexpected steps forward… never thought I’d be where I am right now an year ago. Eh… an year ago. Time’s funny. How all the dates, celebrations and events seem to blend in to a collective memory, distorting time and our perception of it… Summer’s here. That’s for sure. Where we’ll we been in one year’s time? Pfff…. I can’t even begin to guess…

Such is life… one day at a time and each day seems shorter and shorter. Can’t get enough time to do all I wanted to do. Maybe I just need to organize myself a little better. Grow up a little more perhaps. Live a little more… eh… many things have happen, I just didn’t wrote them…

Anyway… Hope I can get back in to a more regular posting scheme

Cheers

(This was a story I sketch two years ago or something like that to participate in NaNoWriMo… I never ended up doing it, but I wrote this intro, so why not publish it? Maybe I’ll continue it one of these days)

THE AWAKENING

by Petros Miklos

.

The wind blew gently past Neu Fawlk’s long dark reddish hair as he kept running through the valley of information before his eyes.

He had just logged in and was just perusing his own local cluster for any recent alterations.

The field below was dense as a black hole, full of compressed and encrypted information just screaming for the right scalpel to peel they protective layers off and gaze in to the wondrous mysteries they hold, just what Fawlk enjoyed.

A blink flashed and Fawlk logged off with a grumpy noise returning back to the reality which held his physical existence.

***

The room where he stood was quite large given the value of real space those days. That’s not to say that he actually bought it. No, he just stole the money from somebody else and paid to have a reasonable apartment but not large enough to warrant any undesired attention to his income winning methods. The fact was the single room was most of the house size and hold most of the equipment within, serving as bedroom, living room and kitchen at the same time. There two other small divisions in the flat. A cranky tiny bathroom with the minimal facilities and a cubicle he used as a storage facility.

There was one large polymorphic window occupying most of one wall of the main room. The fact that it was a real window to the outside itself made the flat value rocket upwards, but Fawlk liked to consider it his little vanity. One window to the real world, thousands of virtual windows to the thousands of virtual ones. It was his moment of poetry, a touch of class and philosophy to what was otherwise a flat in dire need of a cleaning.

The fact that he himself didn’t liked to go outside his realm only made things worse. There were many reasons as to why he always stay at home. He didn’t liked to travel, he didn’t liked to walk, he despised public transportation, driving a ground car was just insane and inefficient and any non-ground vehicle required him to attend some sort of school which, undoubtedly, added people to the equation, and plenty of them, that of course was just not going to happen. The fact was that he enjoyed being alone, hidden in his refuge, surfing the information highways, watching the world, learning, experiencing, interacting but in the comfort of his lair. “What’s the point of going anywhere if you can know everything about it right here?” he kept saying to himself. All he ever needed was at a finger’s distance, and that was just the way he liked it. THAT was comfort, that was his pinnacle of evolution, that was his life.

But aside the dozen cores, memory storage’s, screens, interfaces, drivers of all kinds dating back to the stone-age of the internet, there was a peculiar fact about Neu’s life that elude the naked eye: a woman. She was no princess by any means, just a drug addicted vagrant that managed to find her way in to the hacker’s life. The two of them were outcast of society, one by choice another by consequence. She provided him help with menial tasks he abhorred doing, such as garbage disposal, cleaning his clothes, the occasional exquisite food that wasn’t home delivered and menial tasks as such. Plus, she served as a counterweight for him, preventing him from over abusing is time online; while he, on the other hand, prevented her from buying crappy and flawed drugs or succumbing to an overdose, as also providing her some economic independence so as to avoid further the humanity downfall. Fawlk saw her as his payback to human kind, sort of an excuse or perhaps a way to apologize for the ‘indiscretions’ that he may or may have  not committed online. She was his project to save mankind (one at a time). Tanya thought similarly towards him. In her own way it was she who was saving Fawlk from ‘overdosing’ his own drug.

In the end, she helped him, he helped her. One hand washing over the other. It worked and that was enough for him.

Shaking his head, Fawlk stood up from his bed where he had been for the past hours connected with the massive interplanetary network know as IRNet, short for immersive reality network. It was the source of all information, the core of every system was connected to it, everyone who was someone was linked to it and you could literally see the World in one day there if only your brain could withstand the exertion. He looked around making his neck make cracking noises just before he tapped his console and turn the flat’s lights on and unlocked the door outside.

Tanya walked in looking as pale as usual, puffyness on her half-closed eyes, her clothes worn and battered and in her hands a light polymer box undoubtedly carrying some food and her new batch of drugs.

“Looking pale today…” Fawlk remarked at her, impatiently waiting for her to hurry up.

“Hmmm… Yeah… M’guess” she replied with her voice trailing off.

“Ya had your fix already?”

Tanya just moaned affirmatively, dropping the box next to him before crashing down on the bed.

Fawlk smirked and pondered for a second if it would be worth preaching her about his rules. It wasn’t, she was just too stubborn or to dependent to wait to get home to ice her brain up. He knew the drill and as long as she didn’t killed herself and kept her end of the bargain it was all he really wanted.

Dismissing any more thoughts about her he open the box and took a slice of the organic pizza taking a bite on it.

“Hmmmm, ish ghooth!” he commented aloud, even though Tanya had already blacked out in to her surreal trip.

He turned around facing the keyboard console again. He prided himself in being one of the few hackers that still dwell in ultra-low coding his routines for efficiency high marks. He was just about to finish his latest bot to aid him in his exploratory quests of the I-net. It was a necessity for anyone who wished to peruse the more fundamental layers of the network to customize their browser to fit their whims; there were of course millions of other pieces of ware already available (one way or another) to do this, but to have access to the very specifics of any given task one might want to achieve while hacking, one had to design his own tools or spend years learning to use someone’s else.  Plus there was always the possibility of being hacked by using any of those tools as one could never really know what to expect for such hard-coded routines. So, evidently, as a proud member of an elitist and quite despotism society of hackers, he did it the hard way. It was after all the only way.

***

A couple of hours later Fawlk was still hooked to his console. The food had already cooled down but as Tanya woke up she didn’t mind it much. She said nothing, she knew how much he hated to be interrupted while parussing his own addiction. She didn’t complain, it was him and his long hours logged on that paid her addiction and food, plus the shelter in some way afterall. So she sat there quiet, still feeling the light effects of the drug on her brain, and watched as he digged deep on the many layers of information.

Prologue

The old man stood silent in the night mist, feeling the fresh winter wind rustling through his hair has he looked up high into the sky, gazing at the eternal light of the shining stars. People often forgot to look up and gaze upon the wondrous spectacle that stood over their heads uncaring about their petty lives and affairs… People often forget a lot of things. Often the important ones… Like looking up at the night sky and be amazed by the Universe and glimpse all its affair from high above… All was vanity… What was the point in the end? Hundreds of lives wasted in minutes… And for what?

The old veteran looked around, letting his senses once more be trapped with the worldly scents and sounds. His sword was still reflecting the pale night light below the crimson coat that covered all of it’s blade. Under his feet the corpses of fellow soldiers and enemies alike stood motionless in a grim display of impossible poses and dismembered limps…

“So young…” Petros, better known as the ‘DarkClaw’, muttered through his lips has he gazed upon the battlefield once more and could only see young men and women, slain and with cold eyes in the faces of those that still had them. For some reason he had more and more difficulties lately after a battle to distinguish friends and foes… All looked the same; no loyalty, no country, no flag or standard… Just… Motionless corpses of young people with yet so much to live and no more life to have… It all sounded to be a tremendous waste, and for what purpose? Kingdoms came and went, kings and ideals rose and fall and soon faded in to the oblivion of time and memory…

“What for?…” he asked aloud this time, though barely noticing he had done so, but loud enough to catch one of his captains attention.

“Sir! I thought it would be wise to gather the weapons dropped not to leave them for raiders and vagrants to…” DarkClaw interrupted him with a hand gesture. “As you were Lucian. Carry on.” he said to the veteran captain.

He still remembers the first day he had saw him stepping in to the war academy. Young, proud, arrogant and cocky. He changed too. He’d become a man now. A good loyal friend and a inspiring leader and warrior. Yet, some thoughts were still not to share with him. He was still young in a way, he still could not understand the weight, the burden he would be carrying over his shoulders after so many battles fought…

He took a turn and took another longing look at the massacre’s spoils around him. A grand victory, the historians would write and the bards would sing about the bravery and sacrifice those heroes made that day… But no one would remember the foul stench of the death and the eyes of all those that were slain that day. Their eyes would only curse him, with those last moments of life wasted gazing upon the bringer of their demise. DarkClaw could not remember how many they had been… But he could feel the burden getting heavier with each soul taken… And their eyes… Their eyes always haunting him on his dreams, with their screams, their last words, their last breath in a pulsating turmoil only those who have seen war could understand.

The day had declined. Another battle won. Once again he survived… But how much of him did died there too?