I want to find a way to write about the Odessa catacombs in some future book/story. What a fascinating place.

We sent messages to the aliens, to see if there were aliens. We filled the void of space with television — Nazi rallies and I Love Lucy. We filled the silence with radio signals. We launched spacecraft in search of the heavens, and we filled them with our memories, or at least what we wanted our memories to be. Gold records. Whale songs. Bach and da Vinci. Greetings from people long dead. We beamed fractals and computer programs in every direction. We called out in our own languages, in the languages of mathematics, in the languages of colours. We called out in all the frequencies we could find.

We said over and over, we are here. Come find us. Please.

And we waited for an answer. We listened for radio signals in response. We filled our deserts with Seti arrays to catch whispers from the stars. We scanned the stars and the spaces in between for laser beacons, for the slightest flicker of light that signified something. Anything. We created optical telescopes and spectrometers that had no other use than to study the atmosphere of other planets, searching for some trick of life. We waited for an answer.

It came, as answers usually do, in destruction. An asteroid storm of ice chunks that destroyed most of our satellites at once. Debris tore apart the space station and one of the secret military spacecraft. They made more debris. Our astronauts screamed their own messages into the vacuum. Our sky was ruin and blood.

But then we saw the pattern in the constellations of wreckage. The order forming out of the chaos. Signal emerging out of noise. A message was hidden in their decaying orbits. Our scientists and code breakers worked for lifetimes trying to decipher it, before the signs burned up in the fires of our atmosphere. And then we finally understood it. A new form of binary. A binary of destruction expressed in the remains of our spacecraft and the quantum emptiness they moved through. We didn’t know where the message had come from. We didn’t know what it meant. All we knew is what it said.

we wish you better luck than us

I don’t think I’ve ever beaten my wife in a game of Gloom. Disconcerting.

We sent messages to the aliens, to see if there were aliens. We filled the void of space with television — Nazi rallies and I Love Lucy. We filled the silence with radio signals. We launched spacecraft in search of the heavens, and we filled them with our memories, or at least what we wanted our memories to be. Gold records. Whale songs. Bach and da Vinci. Greetings from people long dead. We beamed fractals and computer programs in every direction. We called out in our own languages, in the languages of mathematics, in the languages of colours. We called out in all the frequencies we could find.

We said over and over, we are here. Come find us. Please.

And we waited for an answer. We listened for radio signals in response. We filled our deserts with Seti arrays to catch whispers from the stars. We scanned the stars and the spaces in between for laser beacons, for the slightest flicker of light that signified something. Anything. We created optical telescopes and spectrometers that had no other use than to study the atmosphere of other planets, searching for some trick of life. We waited for an answer.

It came, as answers usually do, in destruction. An asteroid storm of ice chunks that destroyed most of our satellites at once. Debris tore apart the space station and one of the secret military spacecraft. They made more debris. Our astronauts screamed their own messages into the vacuum. Our sky was ruin and blood.

But then we saw the pattern in the constellations of wreckage. The order forming out of the chaos. Signal emerging out of noise. A message was hidden in their decaying orbits. Our scientists and code breakers worked for lifetimes trying to decipher it, before the signs burned up in the fires of our atmosphere. And then we finally understood it. A new form of binary. A binary of destruction expressed in the remains of our spacecraft and the quantum emptiness they moved through. We didn’t know where the message had come from. We didn’t know what it meant. All we knew is what it said.

thank you for the warning

We sent messages to the aliens, to see if there were aliens. We filled the void of space with television — Nazi rallies and I Love Lucy. We filled the silence with radio signals. We launched spacecraft in search of the heavens, and we filled them with our memories, or at least what we wanted our memories to be. Gold records. Whale songs. Bach and da Vinci. Greetings from people long dead. We beamed fractals and computer programs in every direction. We called out in our own languages, in the languages of mathematics, in the languages of colours. We called out in all the frequencies we could find.

We said over and over, we are here. Come find us. Please.

And we waited for an answer. We listened for radio signals in response. We filled our deserts with Seti arrays to catch whispers from the stars. We scanned the stars and the spaces in between for laser beacons, for the slightest flicker of light that signified something. Anything. We created optical telescopes and spectrometers that had no other use than to study the atmosphere of other planets, searching for some trick of life. We waited for an answer.

It came, as answers usually do, in destruction. An asteroid storm of ice chunks that destroyed most of our satellites at once. Debris tore apart the space station and one of the secret military spacecraft. They made more debris. Our astronauts screamed their own messages into the vacuum. Our sky was ruin and blood.

But then we saw the pattern in the constellations of wreckage. The order forming out of the chaos. Signal emerging out of noise. A message was hidden in their decaying orbits. Our scientists and code breakers worked for lifetimes trying to decipher it, before the signs burned up in the fires of our atmosphere. And then we finally understood it. A new form of binary. A binary of destruction expressed in the remains of our spacecraft and the quantum emptiness they moved through. We didn’t know where the message had come from. We didn’t know what it meant. All we knew is what it said.

we are coming

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Now it’s nap time for you!

Perhaps the aliens are aware of us, but simply indifferent.

I’ve been trying to approach social media like content feeds, dividing up the sort of material I like to post into different streams — Facebook for the personal stuff, Twitter for cultural links, my website for my writing and comics, AuthorsGoneWild for my amateur porn videos. But the process has been driving me crazy. Crazier. Trying to decide what should get posted in which feed sometimes makes me feel like I’m suffering from multiple personality disorder. And it seems to me that most people aren’t using multiple social networks — they’re choosing one and largely staying within that one. Especially as most social services — all? — now have ways of subscribing to other services, or have enabled cross-posting. There’s very little duplication of my friends across the various services I use. Which means my Facebook friends aren’t reading my Twitter posts and vice versa. Or they’re all using pseudonyms. Perhaps I have only one reader, stalking me under a community of fake identities. I can only hope I inspire such passion in someone.

So rather than keep trying to divide myself up, I’m going to treat every service as a sort of lifestream. I’m going to publish more or less the same content on each of my services, using my website as the central hub. Yes, it is rather cylonesque. Hopefully the end result will be better than BSG. I assume people will tune in on the platform of their choice, and my job is to offer my posts on as many services as I think make sense. Like those ads at the back of alt-weekly papers. It’s all fairly automated, so it’s not really extra work for me. But if you’re one of the few subscribed to me on multiple services, you may want to pare your feed list. Or subscribe to all my other feeds!

To facilitate this, I have profiles on several services. Use whichever one makes the most sense to you. I do monitor all of them, and I have alerts set up on all of them, so I will respond to comments made on each service. Unless I think you’re spam. In which case, I have already wired the money to your bank account in Liechtenstein. When do the royal jewels arrive?

Here’s the list:

Peterdarbyshire.com. My personal website. Where you’re reading this.

Amplify. I’ve started using this to post to Twitter and Facebook. It has the same openness and ease of use as Twitter, but it’s much more flexible. I’m not actually a fan of Twitter, because I find its character count too restrictive, and it’s almost impossible to follow a conversation. But Twitter hit critical mass first, so everyone’s on it. I hope more people switch to Amplify, because I think it’s better, but only time will tell. It has a great clipping feature too!

Twitter. I mainly use this through Hootsuite to watch my lists. Like I said above, I post through Amplify, although not exclusively.

Facebook. It’s where I tend to put the more personal stuff, because that’s where most of my closest friends and family are. That’ll probably continue, but I’ll monitor it as my friends list grows.

Friendfeed. A good service but little used. It’s good for collecting people’s different life feeds. It doesn’t seem to have caught on, which is too bad.

Tumblr. I’ve created a Tumblr account that’s fed by my website and my other accounts, for those people who like to use Tumblr for easy reposts, etc.

Flickr. Where I store my photos. Mainly random iPhone shots and the like. I post most of them to my website and Twitter anyway, but not all of them. I have Flickr set up to automatically post to Facebook.

Goodreads. My book reviews. My Goodreads account is subscribed to my blog, so you can read most of what I post through Goodreads if you like. I also repost on Goodreads some of the shorts I publish at peterdarbyshire.com.

Fictionaut. A sort of social networking and literary site. I’m new to it, but it’s been a lot of fun so far. I repost the shorts from peterdarbyshire.com here.

If you use a service that I haven’t listed here, then send me a note and I’ll consider setting up a profile on it. Except for Google Buzz. I tried that already and most of the people I knew hated it.

What I’ve been reading this week:

– The collapse of the Damien Hirst art market (Economist) — Hirst has made hundreds of millions of dollars from selling stuffed sharks and diamond-encrusted skulls to those with even more money. But it seems his fans have been more investors than art lovers. When he started flooding the market with more creations, and bypassing dealers, prices plummeted. So was it a bad move by an artist businessman? Or was it the action of an artist trying to reclaim control of his works from the market?

– Will systempunkt be the blitzkrieg for stateless terrorist groups? (Global Guerillas) — I think it already is. The real question is its efficacy. John Robb points to the threatened Koran burning as an example of the social pressure points that can be exploited to cause broader system chaos and collapse.

– neo lebowski — The Matrix meets the Dude in this YouTube mashup. I wonder how the Church of the Latter-day Dude feels about this.

– We have the technology to build the world’s first bionic kidney (Discover) — I suspect there’s more of a market for bionic livers in North America.

– Life always finds a way (Life, Unbounded blog) — To go extinct. In fact, it seems life is prone to extinction.

– What the paparazzi drive (Globe and Mail) — Satisfying the needs of both stakeout and speed. And camera platform. The existence of the paparazzi troubles me. The fact they’re driving nicer cars than me troubles me even more.

– Geek and Gamer Girls Song (Break music video) — See, ladies, all you need to do to attract guys is engage in some role-playing games. Also, I want to be Seth Green. Following in the esteemed tradition of Do You Wanna Date My Avatar (YouTube) and Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury (YouTube).

The new book has me researching famous Roman gladiators and learning about their fighting styles. Strange days indeed.