Category: Digital Manipulation

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Golden Bowl, Bridge Studios, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Light ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #267

Once the light entered the bowl
Something magical happened
Something I’ll probably
Never fully understand

The light coalesced
Hardened
Formed swirling tendrils
Of incandescence

Well
I understood one thing

Light was alive

No
Not alive

Conscious

And what I was witnessing
Was the comingling
Of unmanifested being
One each to a tendril

Swimming as if a school of fish
In a golden bowl
Struck just the right way
By the sun

And then it was gone
Light
Was merely light
Again

But some trick of the cosmic tail
Had let me in on the secret
Because in an instant
I’d known

Light
Is love
And love
Is light

When we are unmanifested
In this purest spirit form
We know this as surely as
The necessity of a breath

We know it in a way
A brain cannot grok
But our manifest purpose
The meaning of our existence

Is to remember

And for a moment
Looking into a sunlit bowl
I remembered

A glimpse of the unknowable
Out of the corner of my eye

A memory I struggle to keep
Every day

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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.”