DevonianFossil

I... think I finally made it.

Today I graduated with my Bachelors of Science in Earth Science*, the first real step towards a childhood dream of being a scientist. I'm still pretty shell-shocked, I'm sure I'll have more to say later. I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep.

*Geology, for any institution that doesn't have a strange naming scheme like mine.

What have I gotten myself [back] into...

For reasons yet unknown I've always had extremely vivid, full color dreams both good and bad. Most dreams are lost after wakening in the rush to get ready for school; and sometimes I go through a series of tormenting nights when I get only nightmares for no clear reason.
I don't subscribe to seeking meaning in dreams, but then there are those dreams that make me wonder where they came from and why I remember them so clearly.
A couple days ago I had a dream of that latter category.

There was a city.
It was something out of another age. The towers themselves were these elegant spires of wrought metal, with patinaed copper, bronze and brass for the classically ornate roofs. Between each spires' metal pillars were grand glass windows—some clear, some colored—that encased these multistory vaulted rooms like the sides of an lantern.
Drifting in the spaces between them I could even see from outside that each room was a-buzz with different activities, with people racing up and down the delicate wrought iron stairs to balconies. There were vested cartographers with maps on every desk in one, a seven level library in another. A massive clockwork engineering workshop made up the heart of a similarly styled tower, and even an antiquated observatory could be seen turning the great telescope into position.

I knew I had come to warn them about a storm.

The warning itself I don't remember, but without scorn or panic it set off a flurry of activity among the towers. What they did I couldn't see for the skies had turned a wrathful combination of sickly green and dark purple, and the torrential rains began to fall. Drifting once more, I remember the rooms of the towers stayed illumined against the darkness as the people inside were slowly climbing for their lives to the highest levels.
Stranger even than that, it turns out that a relative of mine doesn't dream in colors at all but in grayscale, black and white geometric shapes. The mind is a mysterious place.

What dreams have you?

I guess it's pretty clear that journals just aren't this cyber-hermit's thing, but perhaps there are things amid the chaos worth mentioning.

At the moment I seem to have become stuck on too many levels, for the most part waiting for the clockwork machinations of others that I'm growing ever more convinced can't be arsed to turn. Where does that leave me? At a crossroads with the few things I can control.
More specifically, it is a project of mine that I let grind to a halt amid the complex, turbulent events playing out in Detroit, my home city and the setting for the concept's story. I had found a lot of joy in working out the story, cast, and world on in the corners of other notes and sketches. I've even started the pages. But so far I've found it impossible to separate completely this project from my complicated thoughts and feelings on the regional news. I'll either have to A. forget the project, B. set it aside until it's free of the aggravating interference, C. flee to the wilds of Canada to create, or D. keep at it despite the stress.

If you love the region you live in, watch out for it.


In much, much better news all I can tell you is that something awesome is starting up again. Anything beyond that, I'm still sworn to silence.
Maybe I'll have time to enter some competitions again, who knows?

Ideas are a bit like Giant Squids, they show up when least expected, tangle themselves in our thought process, are bizarre to describe and we've little understanding of where they come from. Heck, they even vanish into the darkness whenever we're ready to capture them! Brainsquids.

This is something I've pondered off an on when trying to get ideas, or when I look back at old work to figure out how I got on such a crazy path in the first place. In particular, I was looking over some notes I found (stuffed away in the bottom of an unrelated box? How did it get there?) on a Digimon OC League I was working out after I lost the first round of TheDigitalCup OCT (now TheDigitalCore) and wondering where the ideas jotted down so messily had gotten their start. I know one thing was my fascination with the aphotic zones of the oceans, another my perpetual roaming of wildernesses in MMORPGs, and still another thought stemming from the debates over judging decisions in OCTs. But some of the original sources for that inspiration I've forgotten over time, even if those ideas have since grown into something new or different from the thought on the page.

Nonetheless, I have it on good word that something even better than the contents of those old notes is in development right now by others wiser than I. Is it something to look forward to? I'd say so, I certainly am.

So, readers and visitors of this page, where did you follow dusty tracks of old inspiration to?



And in boring other stuff, this is my research semester in school and so I won't be joining OCTs right now. That, and none of the ones I have seen around the OCTverse lately seize my attention.