Gratefully remembering

The Artdog Quotes of the Week for Memorial Day 2019

Sometimes it's hard to gratefully remember important things. Such remembering requires that one stop and take stock. Such gratitude requires a certain humility, and acknowledging that there are more important things than oneself.

Sometimes it's hard to feel anything but overwhelmed. This month has been fraught and frantic for me. Two different family members suffered life-threatening illnesses. I've spent a lot of hours chatting with tech support personnel about hitches and glitches that came with the relocation of this website to its own dedicated server.

May also was a two-convention month. And all the pressures, deadlines, and preparation required to kick off another summer's book-and-art tour tend to cluster at the beginning. When else?

But remembering--and remembering gratefully--is important. It's a vital piece of how we understand ourselves in relation to our world, our community, and our relationships. It's so important that we've set aside a day for it.

It's not just a day for picnics (weather permitting), or family gatherings, or swimming pool openings, or barbeque, or even decorating graves, fireworks, concerts, and marching in parades--although we associate all of those things with Memorial Day. It's a day for remembering that without costly sacrifices we might have none of the freedoms we enjoy.

Those open-air concerts, those parades, those delicious meals, might never be possible if we did not live in freedom and peace. Those beloved family members might be scattered or lost. The brave defenders of our liberty, the ones whom we remember on Memorial Day, live within us when we enjoy our freedoms--but also remember that freedom doesn't come for free.

We have a bond of love and honor, an important relationship with those fallen ones who paid so dearly for the things we enjoy. It is our own honor--not theirs--that we stain and trample and besmirch when we forget.

Let us never forget them. But also . . .

Let us likewise never forget the importance of the principles they stood for: freedom and human dignity, opportunity for all; balanced government; respect for the rule of law, but also respect for the people whose well-being those laws are supposed to protect.

Let us remember the whole Constitution, not just our favorite parts. Let us remember the sacred importance of treaties. Let us remember that no matter what we look like, or what our spiritual beliefs (including the lack thereof), or where we came from, or how recently, we all have a stake in the experiment that is our country.

And that every generation inherits the obligation to honor those concepts and that unity-in-diversity that has brought this nation to such vibrant life, if we are truly to honor their sacrifice.

IMAGE CREDITS: Many thanks to News of Mill Creek and the City of Edmonds, WA, for the "Memorial Day Remember and Honor" image; to Bonnie K. Hunter and her Quiltville.com website, via Memorial Day Image.com , for the quilt-backed expression of Memorial Day's purpose; to Funeral One, for the illustrated Schopenhauer and Albom quotes; and again to Memorial Day Image.com, for the closing "Thank You" image.   

Why I go to science fiction conventions

I still owe you a DemiCon 30 report, but this week it's time to get ready for ConQuesT 50. In a couple more weeks, it'll be time for SoonerCon 28. Maybe I'll eventually catch up with myself, but one never knows.

There are a great many Indie authors who don't understand why anyone would go to that many science fiction conventions, much less three additional ones (SpikeCon, FenCon, and Archon), over the course of the next few months. "I always lose money," they say, or words to that effect.

I have a working hypothesis about that . . . and you can read about it on my website.

Any firearms, sir?

The Artdog Image of Interest 

As part of my research on what it's like to live and work as a police officer (since most of my fictional characters work in law enforcement, I wanted them to be as believable as possible), I've been following several (dozen) social media accounts produced by, for, and about cops. One of them is the YouTube channel Mike the Cop.

He and "The Man Spot" worked together on a video that's less than five minutes long, and it had me literally rolling with laughter before the end. This is so . . . American. I hope you enjoy it:



If you'd like to see other posts I've written about first responders, check out "Three great ways to thank first responders," Justice and peace and black and blue," and "Character Sketches."

VIDEO CREDIT: All honor and gratitude to Mike the Cop and his collaborator The Man Spot, for this totally American video! Thanks, guys! And to Mike's YouTube homepage for his banner.

Why does the Earth so often have to die?

How many times and in how many different ways have we destroyed the earth?

One common scenario envisions an asteroid impact. 

The "we" in that sentence refers to science fiction writers. Yet again the other day, a friend read a book description out loud, and the rest of us could almost guess how each phrase would go before she said it. A "dying Earth" (COD not specified in this blurb) has been fled by the "last remnants of the human race" who are, of course, "desperate [for] a new home among the stars."

It doesn't matter which specific book she was reading about. It's a trope so common I'd say it's a cliché at this point.

A visualization of the destruction of Earth through war, courtesy of the Hellcat Fandom Wiki.

Is killing the Earth really necessary?

We're always screwing up the Earth in science fiction.

We over-pollute it, overpopulate it, blow it up (or aliens blow it up for us), fill it with fascists who drive us out, fill it with Zombies who drive us out, fill it with invading aliens who drive us out, we pave it, we run out of food, we run out of . . . you know the scenarios.

All are pessimistic views of our future, and the underlying idea is twofold: killing our mother is inevitable, and we'll find refuge in the stars. Somehow, somewhere.

Widespread environmental destruction is a very real danger, dramatized in this amazing photo of an out-gassing dump in Myanmar. Photo: Nyaung U/United Nations Development Programme 

I'd like to argue that neither is likely, but there's the oil lobby (to refute the first half). We've so far avoided the nuclear holocaust that haunted my childhood during the Cold War, but climate change might just do the job--for humans, anyway.

I imagine that even if we humans kill ourselves, the planet will do what it's always done: grow new things that are better-adapted to the new climate reality. Just look at the woods around Chernobyl.

Here's a modification of a Google Street View by Einar Öberg, exploring the idea of how familiar places might change
"after people." It was inspired by the 2009 History Channel project by that name.

And how 'bout that home among the stars?

As I've outlined in earlier posts, space is a really hard place to live, much less be fruitful and multiply. Microgravity makes everything harder, distances are, well, astronomical, and providing what humans need to survive is hideously expensive, at least right now.

So let's soft-pedal the destruction of earth already, people! We still have no good place to go!

We're very far, still, from creating a space habitat that can safely house space-dwelling families and provide for their childrearing needs.

Anyone who looks at a photo of the ISS can see we aren't currently able to create a viable long-term habitat in space. Who are we kidding, here?

Personally, I'd rather explore the ideas of the Solarpunk movement, which focuses on sustainable scenarios in science fiction. And yes, this means I'll talk more about it in future posts.

IMAGE CREDITS: Many thanks to Universe Today for the asteroid-impact visualization of Earth's demise; to the Hellcat Fandom Wiki, for the visualization of war on Earth; to the United Nations Development Programme for the otherworldly dump photo; to Einar Öberg  on Geek.com, for the visualization of "earth without people" via Google Street View; and to the Patheos blog "Evangelical" for the Interstellar screen shot.

Apartments built like . . . a tree?

The Artdog Image of Interest

The last time friends went apartment-hunting, they didn't look for apartments built like a tree. But the Montpellier "L'Arbre Blanc" ("The White Tree," also called the "White Space Tree") project gives an example why "biomimicry" is a growing design trend.

This is the White Tree, or White Space Tree, designed by Sou Fujimoto and now being built in Montpellier, France.

Architect Sou Fujimoto designed this building for a site along the Lez River in Montpellier on the French Riviera. This apartment building "built like a tree" expresses Fujimoto's design approach based on a "relationship between his architecture and nature."

Fujimoto and his associates conceived the project in 2013-14. Construction started in 2015 and continued into 2018. The project's leaders realized "that in this city, people live outside." According to Manal Radche of OXO Architects, one of the firms involved, that guided their design, which incorporates 193 balconies.

Here's the "White Space Tree" under construction in February 2018, with the main body of the building mostly completed and the upper-floor balconies just beginning to be attached. © F3 LR F.Dubault.

Montpellier is only 10 km from the Mediterranean coast. It has a mild, sunny climate. "Just as leaves in a tree are naturally arranged to get the maximum sun, we’ve mathematically arranged these balconies and cantilevers to catch and shade the sun," Radche explained to Fast Company in 2014.

The 40-million Euro building will be a mixed-use space, with apartments above but also "offices, a restaurant, a bar, and an art gallery." Passive cooling strategies help mitigate how much locally-sourced renewable energy the building needs.

All through April, I featured a series of architectural projects inspired by, and built to incorporate, trees. This post was delayed till May by problems with my website, which I now hope have been resolved.


IMAGE CREDITS: Many thanks to Designboom for the featured image, to 1OneMinuteNews on YouTube, for the video, and to 3 Occitanie for the photo of the apartment building under construction.

May the Fourth . . .

. . . I know you've heard this one. But it's Star Wars Day! How else should the Artdog celebrate?

IMAGE: Many, many thanks to Rich Skipworth via Pinterest, for this image!