It's fine to say "twenty-twenty-five" now, since it's five years away. A totally fine, definitely not confusing project name. Almost definitely probably.  ;P

Five workdays, five projects!
* An MM novel
* A PR novel
* A non-fiction project w/ my spouse
* A novel for a new IP which I do not own!
* And a picture project

Sadly, this will displace my next collection of YMM short stories and my stage-play.

Is this an impossible goal, especially given that I only have 10 months left in 2020? Definitely.

But for the first time in a few years, I feel confident about engaging the work again.  :]

 There have been *soooo* many things I've wanted to (i) write, (ii) write about, or (iii) /facepalm out of existence. To quote Amber Ruffin: "Things. Have. Been. Crazy!"

Scheduling release dates will wait. I have 5 (five! Whyyyiyiy?!) projects that I want to complete in 2020.

"You're getting a pretty late start on them, Jessi!"

Very true, reader.  ;P

I was going to make New Years' resolutions. Ha. A top 5 list of games that I played last year. Ha. An essay on Star Wars Ep 9. Haaa...no; I really want to do this, but it'll be more than 6k words. Ha. Short version.

To get over one addiction, I turned to another: Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR). And...I think it's working! If I stay the course, I'll write an essay about SWTOR in Mar.

Let's put words on those pages! Rem my #1 piece of advice for new writers: you must​ complete a manuscript.

Briefly:

(i) I'm still alive!  ;P  I've spent the past three years battling depression, though the last six months of 2019 were the worst. I have, for the first time in a long time, hope--hope for a much better 2020 for me and my work!  :]

(ii) I saw Episode 9 on the 22nd, and was rejuvenated!  :D  I do not understand the fandom's dislike of this movie; I loved it! On Mon (23rd) I started to write an analysis for the film, but it's going to be 5k words long, and between family and traveling...well, you can expect to see it next week. I will try to post it on/before NYE.

(iii) Now that I have both my depression and my transportation issues solved (thank you Mom and Dad!), I will be returning to my writing with verve!  :]  In the first week of the new year, I'll try to give you a glimpse of my current/future project schedule.

Thank you, dear readers, for your kind messages to me over the last three years! I will return your kindness with good stories!

For all of my ennui regarding travel, sightseeing, zoos, parks, national monuments, world wonders, visual art—anything that primarily affects sight—I get very fluttery when I think I espy a celebrity. At least, someone celebratory to me. Several years ago, I was in a Peets and thought I saw one of the MissCliks hosts. Now, I think I see someone from the Chilluminati Podcast. For the last seven minutes, I have been breathing ‘No, no, no, no’ to calm myself. Lots of people look like lots of people all the time.
 
Oooh, I want to be right, though!
 
Now, the moment of personal insight: I might be a huge fangirl for my chosen celebrities…just like everyone else. Oof.  ;P
 
Working on my stuff! Will leave my publishing schedule TBD for a few weeks longer; hopefully, I’ll have a more precise schedule by the end of August. I appreciate your patience!

Nothing to see here, move it along.  ;P

Oof: this time it lasted for seven months, Nov 2018 until May 2019. I was hoping that Feb 2019 would end it; damn, was I wrong. This winter was wet and cool—very helpful for poor drought-/fire-afflicted California, but unhelpful for yours truly.
 
And now we’re back! Lots of stuff in the works, though the release schedules will probably remain TBD for a few more weeks while I re-take stock. For example: MM05 has been discarded for a new story, in keeping with my philosophy that anything that takes more than 9 months to finish wasn’t meant to be.
 
Exception: PR02—I have to tell this story. It’s a good feeling, actually; it’s the same way that I felt for PR01, which I consider my Master’s Piece.
 
Seasonal Affective Disorder/Depression is a very real thing. Thank you to Jade for giving me a big hug for making it through—that made my day!  :]

Please don't misconstrue my meaning: I am NOT sad that 2018 is over. My Seasonal Affective Disorder is finally over!

It's always so difficult to explain the effects of SAD, because it's not depression, it's not anxiety, it's not the chills, it's not illness, it's not sensitivity--but it *is* all of those. Dysthymia with a purpose.

2018 is over! It was a bad year, and I'm glad that it's gone. The move is done, the trips are done, the holidays done, the medical and dental work done, and thank you--thank you--California for the last two weeks of sunny, 60*+ weather!

What's coming up? I'm going to reassess all of my current projects, and will refine a publishing schedule ASAP--when I know, you will know!

Also on the website/socials will come my 2019 New Year Resolutions a month late, and some small pieces that I toyed with unsuccessfully in the past three months.

Thank you for your patience and a special thank you to readers who contacted me to inquire about my health!  :]

Derives from this episode of Court of Swords:

#MegaManMe

I am Jury-Rig (Wo)Man. Every time you damage one of my goon-bots, I grab debris from objects you’ve destroyed on my level to repair them. The way to beat me is by avoiding all of my minions and sneezing Mega-bot Flu into my face. I don’t technically die, but I’m bedridden for two weeks, so you can just take my stuff.
 
The power Mega Woman derives from beating my level is Transmog Tape: use it on yourself to return some of your life, on a fallen adversary to create a shitty minion, or on destructible terrain to make power-ups. But when you run out of Jury-Rig energy, you have to call a contractor. The contractor may/not condescend to you.
 
 
 

These are based on this post from July 2018.

"Jessi: this is from July."

Yes, it is.

"But what about all of these inexplicable mysteries??"
 
Sure. Let’s give them a whirl.
 
1) Just how big is the universe?
 
Fair query. Depends on how you choose to define and/or measure it. This Oxford study tried to count galaxies. Fine. Also, DOYIOST—“depends on your interpretation of string theory”. The question of “how big” the universe is may not be nearly as important as whether the universe is “open or closed”, or whether some “dimensions” are closed while others are open.
            This question gets a pass, if only because it’s like asking “how many molecules of water are on Terra?” The exact count is not nearly as important as the questions “How do certain biomes use water?”, or “What is the net gain/loss of water from Biome A to Biome B?”
 
2) Where is everybody?
 
Lost in space, pun intended. This is the deep structure for which we try to reach when asking something like Question 1: “If only I knew how big the universe is, I could logically determine where the other intelligent species are!” I am definitely in the top 10% of people yearning for First Contact—contact, finally, with another sentient civilization. Of non-humans. Who don’t look like us, whose DNA is not like ours, whose world is not like ours.
            If that’s what you’re hoping for, I have discouraging news for you: IF we ever achieve first contact, it’s going to be with sapients who look almost exactly like we do. It is logical to assume that a species capable of making first contact:
            * must have prehensile limbs
            * must have at least one limb not required for locomotion
            * must have multiple sensory organs
            * must have fairly limited temperature and shelter requirements
          * has evolved past many biological mechanisms for survival; e.g. no need for: very long or full-body hair; claws or talons; aggressive mouth or muscle structures; exceptional locomotive limbs
            Whether a species communicates within our particular bands of sound or not (e.g. the whale probe in Star Trek VI: “The Voyage Home”), or via sight (e.g. some species of octopus and cuttlefish), or molecular pheromone, another sentient species must have a way to communicate internal thoughts through one or more sensory media. Since vision is superior to other senses in nearly every way, it’s not unrealistic that they, too, will internalize most of their environments through eye-like structures. A species capable of first contact would also have accomplished:
            * our levels of scientific understanding
            * technologies that make communication, work and memory, and travel far superior to their basic sensory capabilities
            * complex linguistic analysis and presentation
            * the ability, with technology, to interface with all macroscopic interpretations of the universe
            …And, sadly, they experience the same frustrating limitations that we face:
            * inability to travel faster than the speed of light (DOYIOST)
            * lack of sufficient power to convey light-based communication very far outside of the solar system
            * biological mortality (on a time span of one or more orders of magnitude above their natural lifespan)
            * no fossil evidence that there exists more than one mildly-advanced civilization somewhere out in space
            No matter how big your Big Numbers are, there’s no confirmed version of the Law of Big Numbers that can spell, with certainty, a guarantee of first contact. But to be fair, we just haven’t been trying for long enough. We’ve only had the capability to create radio waves for a little over a century! Give us time. Have patience…for which, I admit, we just don’t have the lifespan.
 
3) Planet 9?
 
There are thousands of objects in the near-Kuiper Belt. Pluto isn’t that big—it’s “moon”, Charon, is almost as big, such that their center of gravity lies in the empty space between them. They’re an adorable binary system: two small hunks of rock and ice. ‘Oumuamua itself was fairly large. Reality: our telescopes just aren’t terribly great for finding small, dark things amid a haystack of small, dark things. This isn’t necessarily something at which we can become better without getting closer.
 
4) What are black holes?
 
We do know how they’re formed, they do what everything else in space does, and they collect garbage. Settle in for Jessi’s DOYIOST re: black holes:
            Shortly after Einstein’s General Relativity was published, a soldier named Schwartzchild posited in 1921 the existence of a stellar body so massive that even light could not escape its gravity—“black”—which, in the parlance of relativity, resembled a “hole” in the fabric of 4-space. Imagine all massive objects as spheres atop a trampoline: the divots in the surface of the trampoline is the warp of the trampoline’s canvas (“4-space”), and gravity is, in actuality, changes to the paths of other objects one tries to roll along the canvas—just as if you tried to roll a small ball bearing along a trampoline at the center of which a heavy bowling ball sits. So what is a black hole? A bowling ball about which lie a bunch of ball bearings and a shoe and a lazy cat and some dead leaves. And all of your cousins keep rolling crap onto the trampoline because they imagine something different might happen…?
            Roughly eighty years later, my work realized that black holes must emit something. I’ve called it White’s Radiation. You may know it by a different name, after the man who beat me to publication by virtue of being born 30 [??] years before me.
            The obvious query, then: what constitutes this radiation, and by what mechanism is it emitted from this hole from which not even light can escape? Math is a language [earlier anct reference??], and physicists its native speakers. But each subfield of physics has its own dialect, and translation errors abound, especially from math to English:
            From General Relativity: Take your pick: (i) Matter is funneled through the hole to another point in spacetime, a la wormholes. (ii) There exists a yet-unknown particle whose gravitational “charge” is opposite that of normal gravity; they are, therefore, repulsed from black holes.
            From Quantum Mechanics: The universe is quantized, so there must exist no sufficient squares to house a particle around the edges of the Schwartzchild radius [??]. Particles with the velocity vector to carry them to the edge must, instead, be deposited outside of the black hole, and are thereby free of its gravitational trap. Blink and you’d miss it.
            From Yours Truly: Black holes are massive, fiery hot objects. Just like the non-zero chance that all of the oxygen molecules in a room will temporarily isolate themselves into a corner for the hottest of femtoseconds, the energy of the particles within a black hole will inevitably gather at a single point or area upon its surface; this temporary imbalance will force some matter and/or energy to “boil” away from the black hole. This may happen at super-light velocity. This may be enabled by the formation of very heavy particles within the black hole which decay into smaller, more stable particles during the boiling process. The flow of energy within a black hole may resemble a predictable—if unstable—plasma-fluid system; one of Jessi’s postulates regarding plasma dynamics is that there exists a natural properties of plasma particulate which encourages eddy forces that spontaneously keep the plasma “churning”. Just as stars experience solar flares which drive matter and energy from the star, White’s Radiation permits matter and energy to escape the inescapable black hole. From statistical thermodynamics, the rate at which a black hole boils is inversely proportional to its radius; very large black holes persist for a very long “time”, which smaller black holes have shorter lives. Microholes, created in, say, particle accelerators, are very tiny, and therefore, decay almost immediately upon formation.
            Remember Jessi’s Principle: “The universe is dumb and lazy.” If there exists no macroscale mechanic of teleportation, then there is no microscale “quantum” mechanic which allows particles to spontaneously teleport from inside a black hole to outside of its critical influence.
            Please.
 
5) Black hole or galaxy came first?
 
Neither: the sparks came first. Then as the expansion of the universe began to slow, pockets of materia began to coalesce. Where coalescence happened quickly, you got black holes. Then their gravity began pulling in less-dense pockets of coalescence. These became stars. Those pulled in even less-dense groups of particles; those became planets. Etc. ad nauseum.
 
6) Dark Matter is…?
 
JDOYIOST: Light.
            Everyone else’s argument against it:
            Electrodynamics: photons have no mass. Then why is it affected by gravity?
            GR: light follows the path of the trampoline of spacetime. Wouldn’t that require light to interact with the ether of spacetime?
            SR: there is no ether. Yet, E = mc^2 = hv, where h = Planck’s Constant = 6.626E-36 Js. This equation defines a linear relationship between the frequency/energy of a photon and its “rest” mass.
            QM: Heisenberg says that the position and momentum of a particle can’t both be known below some minimal product value. And if a photon has no mass, x*p = x*m*v = 0 which is not >= h-bar/2.
            If light possesses the properties of both particles and waves;
            And matter also possesses those properties;
            Then why would light not possess mass?
            [My official estimation of mass of light in universe, compared to estimate of DM??]
 
7) Temp of DM?
 
            This depends on your definition of “temperature”. In physical chemistry, temperature is the amount of vibrational KE of a particle; particles of higher mass require more KE to vibrate than lighter particles. Yet by most definitions, light has no mass. Does that mean light is infinitely hot?
            Without delving too far into it—for no other reason than I haven’t finished this proof yet—if DM is light (see (6), above), then the temperature of DM is the temperature of light…whatever that may be.
 
8) Dark E is ?
 
I’m still working on it; ask me again in a few years.
 
9) Where’s our second star?
 
This has a lot to do with “why are we here” horse manure. Life is not special. Life forms in places where it can. It’s easier for life to form on places like Terra, with single stars, lots of water, nearer the fringe of a galaxy. We have to stop asking “Why is Earth so special?”, and start realizing: “the mold grew on Terra because that was the box in the back of the fridge we forgot to clear out last week.”
            We have no second star because it is much harder for life to evolve in binary star systems.
 
10) Where did Luna come from?
 
As (9): if we didn’t have Luna, we probably wouldn’t have the life we have now. Don’t ask “why do we have this moon?”; ask “how can we find other dense, rocky planets with moons?”
            Luna permits the tides which, combined with Terra’s axial tilt, promote weather, oceanic currents--movement. Much like in a plasma, there exist spontaneous properties which churn the constituents of Terra, critical for the formation of life. Jessi’s Principle: plasmas create cool things because of this churning; so too is life created upon lifeless planets by the constant churn of energy/warmth and biochemicals.
            Incidentally: humans still churn together to produce little whiny humans.
 
11) Why is Mercury?
 
The question’s description actually answered itself: all four of the inner planets have large, liquid-metal cores. Mercury is so close to Sol that most of its atmosphere and crust were boiled away. Done.
 
12) Arecibo Message
 
Probably no one. Ever. We just don’t have enough power to get any light-based message anywhere in one piece. Probes, ironically, are a better bet for now.
 
13) Quantum Entanglement
 
Why is this in the space Qs? Jessi’s lesson on “Quantum Entanglement”: I have two cards, the red joker, and the black joker. Without looking, I give you one of these cards, and I keep the other one. Then I go to Japan, for reasons. Then, at a completely unpredictable time, you look at the card I gave you: it’s the black joker! Now, you immediately know that my card must be the red joker—“instantaneously”, you didn’t even have to text me!
            This is, loosely, aka “quantum teleportation”. Both are stupid misnomers.
 
14) Antimatter
 
This is…super well-known. I think the question is actually asking: why did the universe form with 99.9+% “normal” matter, and so little antimatter? This violates a symmetry that mathematicians like. Loring’s Postulate actually proposes an answer to this Q:
            It’s not. There is no way to determine the “materia” of a particle by observing photons radiated from it. It is possible that the Alpha Centauri star system is actually comprised of amtimatter; it is possible that our materia probes will try to pass through the bow shock of Alpha Centauri and literally disintegrate by anti/matter eliminations. Low-levels of these constant elimination interactions may explain the CMB….
 
15) The “space roar”
 
Go sit next to a waterfall. Tell me what it sounds like. Then I’m going to freak out about it—the completely inexplicable and shocking “water roar”!
 
16) How do stars explode?
 
Actually, this is a really cool Q. Refer to (6) re White’s Radiation and the spontaneous churn of gigantic plasma bodies.
            As the energy/matter imbalance of a star or black hole reaches a critical limit (for which, at the moment, I have no definitive value), the statistical likelihood that a stellar body will emit becomes the likelihood that it will fracture along a significant “fault line”. The energy released between these two clumps suffices to force them apart from one another. This enables a chain reaction, exothermic, which causes the entire body to dissociate, creating supernovae. Their disc-like nature is an artefact of that fault line, which may seem “2D” to our 3D eyes, but may actually represent a critical value in the other 7 dimensions.
 
17) Are cosmic rays getting worse?????
 
I actually don’t know a lot about this phenomenon, but it’s akin to feeling a giant gust of wind and wondering: “Is a tornado coming??” Or maybe it’s just a gust of wind. So, we’ll die or we won’t. I guarantee that cosmic rays will not worsen over the course of a human life, unless the increase is the wavefront of a tidal tornado wave that will annihilate us all.
 
18) Is there a multiverse?
 
DOYIOST. Also, buy my next sci-fi book, PR02!
 
19) Are they daughter universes??
 
If you buy two copies of PR02, you can give one to your daughter. Or you can set them side-by-side, and imagine they are the daughter cells of mitosis.
 
20) …or parallel universes???!?
 
This is when you stand two copies of PR02 adjacent each other on your bookshelf. If one is upside down, then it’s “anti-parallel”.
 
18, 19, 20) For realsies: DOYIOST. And no. Our interpretation of “dimension” needs to be updated. Just…just buy my damn book when it comes out.
 
21) Big Crunch or Freeze?
 
We’re still crunching the numbers on this one. More likely: we’ll have localized crunches as local black holes gather enough stuff before they supernova, serving as isolated islands amid the big freeze. But…then we’ll have lots of little big bangs, and they’ll reach out across the freeze to “speak” to each other again. Maybe that’s why the “roar” of gamma rays.
 
 
(Epilogue) Parting Thoughts: Panic less. Yes, there are lots of things we still don’t know about space and the universe. But we’ll set about finding those answers in the ways we always have: we’ll see it through a telescope, then say “ooh, I wonder what that is!”, then we’ll go—two or three missions will fail and die—and five centuries later we’ll learn that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 and gave a bunch of diseases to the locals that caused genocide.
            And as the distant descendant of someone on the victorious “Manifest Destiny” side of that practice, I am appalled. Is it so important that I exist now? Would I give up my possessions, my health, my life, to give those deceived, deceased locals a “fighting” chance five centuries ago? Yes, yes I would. But that’s easy for me to say, since I barely have my health anyway.

Emily and Her Little One
 
In early July I was flying north to see my parents, and I had one of the most life-affirming experiences, thanks to Emily.
 
Emily and her ~10 month-old little girl were already seated when I boarded the puddle-jumper. At first, I thought I saw a look of annoyed apprehension cross her face—for which I could not blame her: I’d been flying all morning too, and passengers are unkind to infants and toddlers on-board. What struck me immediately after Emily’s visage was the simplicity of her flying experience: no child-seat nor harness, no bulky baby bag—in fact, no luggage of any kind. Just a young woman in jeans and sandals with her young baby. When I sat beside them and placed my computer under the seat in front of me, the little one grabbed a drawstring on my jacket. And that began our friendship.
 
For 42 minutes, Emily and I chatted about the weather, our spouses, our families, our work—all of the big New Acquaintance topics. Her little girl spent half of the flight trying to fit the entirety of my jacket’s drawstring into her mouth, the other half trying to strangle her mom with it. It. Defined. Precious!  :3
 
Nearly seven weeks later, the experience sticks with me. (In fairness, I always seem to meet interesting people on flights; hello to Dennis back from a month in AK!) A mom, a baby, and a stranger—no paraphernalia, no fuss. The little one never cried, never shrieked; she simply interacted and observed the world around her. I realized that this might’ve been what life was like for our tribal ancestors twenty millennia past: humans, just humans, the young, the slightly older, and the incoming generation. It felt very raw, very real, and very obvious—somewhere in that 42 minutes, the kindness, love, and harmony of life was laid bare.
 
So thank you Emily: sitting next to you reaffirmed my optimism for the human spirit.  :]