Lev Lafayette's journal

The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour. The entire planet is hurtling around the sun at sixty seven thousand miles an hour. And I can feel it.

I was rather impressed by this Christopher Eccleston quote as the Ninth Doctor, which re-established the series and gave it added seriousness by dealing with the complexity of the issues surrounding time travel. It was demanding, challenging, almost expressing anger with triviality. In the real world, I am quite fond of the elegance of Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov's work in this field. But I do feel it, in the spatial and temporal sense. The sheer immensity of the universe compares grandly to the small gods on the pale blue dot that humans seem so prevalent to following.

Today I began my 49th orbit attached to the third planet of Sol (on the eve of a planetary alignment - the stars are right!. Although this poor planet which has a questionable future (I am following the deliberations of the Athropocene Working Party quite closely). A small mountain of well-wishing came through, mostly on Facebook, of which I am deeply appreciative. Facebook of course is the mass consumer social media; Livejournal with its implicit anonymity and and orientation towards more productive and reflective entires cannot compete against the immediacy of a shared stream.

Clinging to this speck in space, in a blink of time's eye, hurtling ever onwards to a terminal conclusion, one cannot help but wonder, if there is anyone out there? Some may recall last September the paper that popular media reported that looked like alien megastructures. At the time, the paper argued that the aperiodic dips in flux was probably due to a family of exocomets (but it didn't stop me from reading it in detail and telling caseopaya that 'this may be the most important scientific paper ever written'). Now it turns out that comets cannot explain the flux issues - and New Scientist has been brave enough to use the "A" word.

It may seem minor in comparison and it doubtless is, but one of my gaming groups has convinced me to run an Eclipse Phase campaign, starting this Sunday. I've run it before, and played in two different stories. But running my own narrative will allow me to engage to some detail with the game rules, and to push the transhumanism and first contact themes along with a deliberately chosen isolationist (outer planets) setting. As part of the RPG Review Cooperative I'll also endeavour to use this as a foundation for an Eclipse Phase Companion.