...tokyo video updates...30apr13...

...a plethora of gifts...28apr13

Since youtube, in their wisdom, don't feature on their new look, here's the latest video I've posted: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7b1liDNqBE.  This is an example of the arcade culture still alive and well in Japan.  Lots of lights, sounds and lights...and sounds.  Looking to get some time to put together a photo mosaic of the best shots from the last trip.

Outside of that, with more to follow this week, a few updates on twitpic tonight: http://twitpic.com/photos/jackedwardsshow.  Including a great restaurant in Anaheim Hills, if you're digging on some excellent Thai food (pad thai, rice and thai tea = yum!) at Siam Savory on 751 S Weir Canyon.

 yep.

...oh, miss kitty...the places you excite in me...

Updates continue after some time on the road (or aeroplane as it were) the last couple of weeks.  Miss Kitty updated the last two weeks with new chapters, starting here: http://www.wattpad.com/15729172-miss-kitty-viii.  Love is a dicey proposition, and, like me, never seems to go off well.  While writing, Mister Pourcel provided a bit of musica romantica in the background, as Rebecca and the 'Guy' polish off a date at an Italian restaurant and discuss Longfellow.

Beyond that, there's a bunch of projects sitting in my lap.  They stare at me like wooden snakes.  It's like they are toxic, but don't bite, so they just sit there.  Imagine the noise when I stand up.

DeviantArt is updated as well, with recent shots from Tokyo: http://edwardianjackal.deviantart.com/.

Beyond that, I haven't written to much of my past Lenten experience, more than likely in that I wasn't too committed.  Needless to say, I've extended it, embraced it and carry it through for more weeks than may be deemed necessary.  But, our journeys are all different, are they not?  Mine follow a shadow, a thin one.  It casts itself between light and dark, and the cast of light is much slimmer these days.  What happened we can only guess - but the world is much different than so many years ago.  I shall continue to pray and the sounds from this organ piece are just a hopeful aside, and mirror my hope for this world.

...the girl, blue, hid amoung the alchemist's hubris...21apr13

This story relates to an io9 writing prompt, here: http://io9.com/concept-art-writing-prompt-blue-girl-in-the-chemists-476597075, the story prompt relates to the graphic of a little girl hiding under an alchemists work desk.  He stares wildly into a blue rose that appears to glow upon a table.

At last!  I would exclaim it but for fatigue.  This proof before me is evidence that I am, if anything, the epitome of perseverance.  As a lyrical aside to the entire endeavor, I finished it when I thought I would: in the stillest hours of the night, the late spring air quiet, and the grasses around my laboratory resting.  This is done which had been lost decades before.  Blue: life giving hue, how we are pained for having lost the Contrariant!  Would it be known that an alchemist would restore it?

My grin was painful and my face unused to such joyous exertions.  I was much more adept at scowling through glass, my eyes fatigued at watching thousands of reactions.  I verged on weeping, my eyes now moist.  The elation that shivered across the cooling sweat across my robes only affixed the sequence to arrive at this point.  The cat shivered at the sight of it all.

The counter on my log had me at hour 2,789.  I will keep it at that time and move the notes from ‘antecedent’ to a triumphant, ‘subsequent’.  The processes in this last iteration, in a series of some 14 steps, became quicksilver in my memory.  Each built upon the other, the success apparent as it moved from base elements, growing, adapting, and then, definitive perception within the lattices of transformative materials.

Blue had escaped our known world well before I was born.  And with the lack of blue, the world was vastly changed.  Our sky became a white, a clear, or a quality of pitch – the oceans became dark.  The animus of the creatures shifted and many of them are simply no more.  The plants adapted, but the system of dependency erupted into chaos.  People starved, populations shifted to an unhappy sustenance.

My instructor, well over 90-years in age when he left us, had seen the Contrariant, the opposing element of fire disappear in a series of days when he was no more than six.  He infused into me, as one would artemis shade into the bloodstream, all of his studies, the collected works of the entire alchemy endeavor, from libraries that were vacant with death or disinterest.

I thought of him through my eyes as I pored over the flower.  It lived in a sustaining medium, which would only give me a few hours, but I will say, by the vibrancy of the colour, it will carry beyond its death.  If not, I can create more.  The formula is but 14 steps of some 17 materials over the course of little more than five hours.  The petals were firm, healthy.  The leaves reached out towards the artificial light, as best as I could to match the perception of sunlight.  I wanted to grab it, smell it, and move it across my cheeks, for no flower of this size had grown before.  The seeds for it were long dormant, almost ancient.

As a man of letters would say (my own degree from the Falls of Highland), there was even more work to be done.  That was for sure.  I would now approach the High Councilors for assistants, capital.  The process could even be simplified enough to give them each a rose, how such a demonstrative survey would prove my point!

And, then, what then?  From here, could we restore the seas?  The sky?  The very world?  That is the question that will make those three thousand hours turn to triple the amount.  But we will have purpose, we will have aim.

There was aberrational Apocrypha to contend with.  But I pay it little mind.  My instructor was firm in his convictions, but, for my own, I am less inclined to believe the stories.  The return of the Contrariant would bring upon us great consternations, since it’s opposite, red, the fire, the moltem of the world, would become irate.  The worshippers of Fire, apocryphal as they are to most of us, believe that blue had disappeared as a natural consequence of history.  But – here is proof that they are wrong.  How this, if I bandied it about their sulfuric temples, would crash their perceptions.  They’ve called up on my death before.  But, if we are to believe it, then there would be the deaths of what little thousands are left in this world.  My work will need to be wildly published; it must survive me and the whims of the mad.  But I distinctly remember that Hope, a product of the return of the Contrariant, would, by great trials, bring a Mutual Exclusivity.

Now, I said, finally breaking away from the rose, there were two seeds.  What happened to its twin?

...impressions of city last week...

Rain came in a light mist.  So soft and spacious in the air you could not feel it.  It was only after twenty minutes that you would discover that you were soaked along the front of your dress.  The ground glossed on the asphalt.  The red brick became slick.  Hit it laterally and dress shoes would slip.  The clatter of hard soled shoes were softened today because of it.  It was quieter on the strip on the way to the station.

The air did not smell differently.  I wanted the ionized smell.  I longed for it.  It had been much too dry in my area, the driest in some time.  But there was no special smell.  The town sat along the bay, the air was just infused with the same water as the sea.  There was a sulfur smell.  It couldn't be helped: there was standing water in some areas that would only take extraordinary circumstances to dissipate.

In fact, the aqueduct that ran along the tract of houses would be home to a few ducks and a two koi.  The water was stagnant, rancid.  The 'soil' at its bottom was sludge more than dirt.  It had the consistency of oil.  If left to air, most of it would evaporate.

This is an ancient land, as all are.  The history runs in hundreds of years.  Some of it restaurants, its homes, run in centuries, not weeks.

Their wood speaks, it must.  It has been touched by millions of hands, breathed upon, walked along, unsparingly cleaned.  A fastidious people.

But.  What of the water?  Why is it neglected?  Why is the same care of the tangible unapplied to its water?  Water is the absolute source of life.  It should be clear, refined.  What would the ancients say?

Take your hands and run it through
Make it clear, let it glean
Through your fingers, in your palms let it rest
Moisten the Earth, let the seeds drink
Her body should run through it
Her pale skin sending echoes in her wake
Her hair, glistening like black pearl
The crane watches
Unafraid