This, what I’m calling a partial of Nalbo’s mangled hand, began its life in a totally different kingdom of life. Have a look for something fungal. Its image, once I’d cut certain pieces away, sort of reminded me of a mangled hand I once did see … a shocking injury … I thought would illustrate Nalbo’s injury nicely.
Below is an example of a autostereogram. ‘Crossing your eyes’ (crossing the lines of sight from your eyes) you should be able to see a 3D version of this pic. This concept, invented by the Hungarian neuropsychologist Bela Julesz features in this chapter.
Forgot to get the reference, it’s from the Wikipedia article about autostereograms.
My online world broke this morning, like this tile broke … and was rethought in the way that I’m having to rethink my desktop …
I was glad to hit on a familiar page at last with this one … my WordPress dashboard. Thankfully, it was the same as it’s always been. I heaved a sigh of relief when I arrived.
It was then 2.30 PM and I’d struggled since I sat down after breakfast and chores to get back to my familiar scenario. My troubles began when suddenly my online bank was unavailable and the helpline operator and I thought at first that I’d been hacked.
But no, my then-browser updated overnight and apparently threw up a firewall that kept me out of my bank as well as several other places. Well I thought, away with that browser. I de-defaulted it and all my problems began.
Who knew there’d be 500+/- settings, and that there’d be a whole different architecture to accustom myself to, and that there’d be a bunch of new rules? One good thing about the new old browser is that everything is easy to find. I learned more about browsers in a couple of hours than I’d learned the whole year with the de-defaulted one.
I hope all the new stuff sticks in my head, as do I hope that all the stuff I have open on the desktop stays on there when I close the laptop. That I don’t have to find it all from scratch again next time I open the lid.
And although I enthusiastically welcome the password app, I also wrote down a bunch of them. You never know when you might be shut out, and at what level.
I managed to retrieve the situation without the help of an AI assistants, I’m glad to say. What FB AI assistants are doing beggars belief.
This story was written well before the no-no thing started about dogs dying in a story.
[I realize dogs are our best friends. I’ve owned a dog myself and it was a wrench to let her go when that became necessary. She was only nine years old when she developed a brain tumor and could not be saved.]
In this story one of the dogs briefly dies. So, I guess, you can take this as a spoiler alert.
At the time when I started writing Claire’s and Nalbo’s stories, I titled the manuscript Earth Fall for a working title. History soon caught up with me and there have been a novel, a film and a four-person shooter video game published by that name, and I thought for a while that I would change the name, the way that I renamed the story that became Lodestar.
But Earth Fall still makes the most sense for this story of the alien engineer, in an Earth-centric orbit for fifty years in his spaceship, comes down to Earth for an as yet unknown reason, leaving the majority of his alien and human support system to keep his spaceship in orbit.
His arrival in Earth’s neighborhood caused all sorts of distress to electronic communications and transport, as apparently his spacecraft grazed over the fields of electrical pulses. Communication satellites stopped working on day one, and humanity teetered at the brink of collapse for a decade before things stabilized, minus electronics.
Sounds like a fairly weak set-up in this day and age, though many a film plot has got up and run with much less originality. But it’s Claire’s and Nalbo’s meeting with the Lotor-alien’s life-support system that’s of interest here.
Claire and Nalbo are a pair of fairly ordinary Australian retirees whose lives intersect with a bunch of completely unordinary alien beings. The things happening as a result are necessary knowledge (for you) if later on I decide to also serialize MELD (Part 2 of the Doomed trilogy). They are a prequel, if you like.
Rita de Heer 