Category: Detail

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Depths, Hotel Continental, Tangier, Morocco

Depth ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #206

I leave the depths unplumbed
Fearful of its denizens
Unaware
All my fears
I carry on my shoulders
A smothering weight

Take a breath, my son
Take a breath
Sit with the present

What you fear
Is already past
Or has not come

That is all your dour spelunking
Will ever find
So long as you believe
The depths are darkness

Be not your mind
But mindful
Open your heart
For in its depths
Is always light

I leave the depths unplumbed
Take a breath
Quiet my mind
And from the depths rises
The light that is love

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The Touch of... A-Maze-ing Laughter, Yue Minjun, Morton Park, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Being ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #191

This is a bit of a rough sketch for a chapter in a series which began with Come It Said and continued to Like a Hammer on a Drum. These stories revolve around the idea of a sort of ‘electric Buddha’ I’ve been toying with for years.

Also, my apologies for the lateness of this week’s challenge. I had to work today, and then this much prose takes much longer to pen than a poem. 😉

The situational awareness of a Series 25 is pretty hard for a mere human to wrap their head around. While these battle droids are equipped with a pair of excellent optical sensors, positioned to replicate the appearance of a predator’s stereo vision, it is their internal sensors which provide the bulk of their operational data. These include radar (both atmospheric and ground-penetrating), with full sonic and electro-magnetic spectrum arrays. Their entire body acts as an antenna, collecting sensory data in a sphere up to a one kilometer radius. The Quantum Processing Unit parses and analyzes this data in real-time, determining all relevant threats in the sensory sphere and developing ongoing action plans for eliminating them.

I talked with a droid designer once who said there was really no way of putting an upper-limit on how fast a 25 can assess and respond to every situational detail of a battle in terms I could understand. “But,” she said, “if you can imagine beating Bobby Fisher at chess one hundred million times in a nanosecond while simultaneously playing every instrument for a full orchestra’s rendition of the William Tell Overture, you’ll have an inkling.”