Transitioning to WordPress

June 22, 2008

Undercity Gotham - Part 3

December 29, 2007

Sylvie had been cut off mid sentence.  Alex’s prospective assassins must have set up a commlink jammer that cut out the cemetery’s remaining wifi service.  That Kawashira-san would spend that expense meant that Alex had been right to arm himself for war back at his penthouse.  He just hoped that his assault rifle, armor, and body would hold up against the pounding they were about to take.  He had a couple of nasty surprises literally up his sleeves and, if he was lucky, his feigned limp would initially make some of the yakuza soldiers overconfident initially.  Alex figured he could use every advantage he could get.

Undercity Gotham - Part 2

December 28, 2007

Alex sat on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and waited for Kawashira-san and his soldiers to show up.  The Met was more or less in its original form, saved via a concerted effort by the people of New York to rescue one of the city’s few remaining landmarks.  It had been covered in a thick protective coating that made the limestone look like bone-colored wax.  Anything less and the Indiana limestone would have melted away long ago....

Undercity Gotham - Part 1

December 27, 2007

I’ve dreamed of being an author of fiction ever since I first read Asimov’s Foundation series as a kid.  I’ve written things here and there, but today I’m taking my first real step into the world of being a fiction writer - I’m self-publishing, for free, my first story here on my website.  Part one is up today, and I’ll be putting up some more of it each day before the end of the year, and then I’ll collect all the bits into a single page where you can read all ~10,000 words in a single place. 

Corn ethanol production is killing the coastal Gulf of Mexico

December 18, 2007

Corn requires a lot of nitrogen fertilizer, and that nitrogen is inefficiently used by the corn it’s applied to.  So a significant percentage of it ends up in the Mississippi River and ultimately in the Gulf of Mexico.  There it’s converted into red tides that die off and leave thousands of square miles of Gulf fishery dead.  And so more corn grown for conversion into fuel ethanol means more nitrogen and a larger dead area in the Gulf.