The Night Flight

It's been a long while since I last posted here, but I'm not letting this blog die just yet.  I've got twenty or so minutes before I have to go to school, which means plenty of time to talk to you all (if there's actually anyone reading this blog).

Anyway, I've been real busy lately with all sorts of stuff.  The first is that my older brother has just left on a mission, which means that I'll be trading letters with him for about two years before he's finished and comes back home.  Then it'll be my turn by then; I'll be old enough and will have left high school far, far behind, without a single regret!

The next is that my older sister and I have entered the National Novel Writing Month for the month of November in the United States.  Over the course of thirty days, each entry is to write 50,000+ words.  We're about nine days in and I have almost 26,000.  My older sister wonders how I can keep so interested in this.  The truth is that I'm getting bored more and more often, and new story ideas keep cropping up in my mind with every week that passes by.  Oh well.  It just means more to work on when I finish this.  The goal of this NaNoWriMo thing is not to write the next great American novel, rather, to just get as much of it done as possible.  All the errors, misspellings, misconceptions and angry swearing that is stemmed from stress over writing can all be edited out after the completion of the first draft.  I've been trying to pressure myself into doing this kind of stuff for some time now, and now finally I've worked up the nerve.

Well, there's more happening in my personal life.  But, since this is the internet and that kind of information is free-game to anyone who comes by this blog, I'd rather nto talk about it.  So stop asking me!

Looks like I've got ten more minutes left, so I'll go on.

Just a few days ago I saw "The Fourth Kind."  It's a mockumentary that is supposedly based off of actual case studies about alien abductions in Nome, Alaska.  After investigating further, I found that the movie was pretty great, but a load of bull when it comes to being based off of actual case studies.  There was no record in Nome, Alaska among the official sociey of psychologists of a lady named Abigail Tyler, who was the woman who talks us through the whole ordeal of the film, which is all happening to her.  I also discovered that the case studies were really more based off of actual crimes in Alaska, rather than anything else.  And the disappearences in Nome, Alaska are, according to the FBI, are due to alchohol abuse and the low temperature.  Oh well.  I still liked it a lot.

But before the movie started, there was a trailer for a really great looking movie.  Now, I'm sure you've all noticed the ridiculous fad that's been going around about vampires.  Everyone's jumping on the bandwagon, and normally it's all very irritating.  But this movie seems to have a great deal of promise, and really brings an interesting point of view to the whole vampire thing.

I'm really excited to see what this movie is rated.  Hopefully it won't be some hard-R that's just filled with violence for the sake of violence.  That would be disappointing...

Wow!  I've run out of time just trying to find that video again.  Okie-doke, I'm gone.  I'll post another... post... when I have the chance.  Adios!

- N.S.

I'm just making a post because I'm feeling fairly bored.  Not much to really report, actually.

I saw Stargate Universe this recent Friday, and looking away from a surprising sex-scene that I didn't really see coming, I thought it was fantastic.  It was pretty different from Stargate SG-1 or Atlantis, but, rather, more like the original film, with sprinkles of some of the two original series.  But I was surprised to see two things: cameos of three of the four originals from SG-1, and Daniel Jackson (Michael Shanks) doing an introduction video for one of the scientists of the show's cast, with him speaking of things like hyperspace and the physics of Stargates as if they were textbook science.  Interesting.

Next, my best pal is planning on learning how to do a one-handed hand stand, and I warned him not to kill himself.  He asked me, "How is a one-hand stand dangerous?"  So I drew him out a picture.  I'm pretty proud of it, actually.

I think he learned his lesson.

Anyway, I'm done for now.  Good night, everyone.

- N.S.

Well, life's been pretty good recently.  I've just pretty much wrapped up my three articles I was writing for the October issue of my high school's newspaper, and they're all pretty decent, if I do say so myself.  And I've already turned in my first draft for the November issue, so that's cool.  Next topic.

I'm on a new story of mine, and it's fairly complex, which is really to my liking.  I typed up a synopsis with background information on my website just a few minutes ago, so let me see if I can get that and just paste it in here...  Here it is.

"I've got a new story, and I think you guys will really like it.  It's about the small crew of two species (both human, to their surprise and perplexity) aboard their very first, and experimental, Faster-Than-Light starship, using wormholes.  I was inspired to do a book on a wormhole drive after seeing an episode of "the Universe" entitled "Cosmic Holes," in which black holes, white holes and wormholes were discussed.

But the big key to this story is defining reality, and what makes us human.  In this day and age, humans and these alien humans as well have a series of nanites implanted into their bodies to assist in things like strength, information retrieval and even altering your dreams to where you can lucidly weave a vivid tableau of your choice into an adventure while you sleep.  It's about the idea that something may have happened to these peoples and they don't know it, because the nanites have been programmed to either delete or block the memory.  But the true background of the story is really underneath all of this: defining God and the afterlife without bias of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, etc.

The concept is called virtuality, and I derived it from the term Virtuality Continuum.  The Virtuality Continuum is an anthropologist's model that has four categories.  In order across the spectrum it goes -- Actual reality, augmented reality, augmented virtuality, virtuality -- meaning that as you move further across the spectrum, you augment more and more virtual aspects into reality as you go, until it's a new universe all together.  My idea is complex though, so kind of get comfortable.

- Theory of Virtuality -

Thinkof our universe as a video game, perhaps Halo.  Master Chief and the other soldiers run around, doing their thing: shooting down Covenant ships and killing aliens, because that's all they know.  They have a set path that can't be detoured -- ie, playing the game from beginning to end -- and they don't understand how or even realize that there's a greater world beyond their own that has designed everything in their universe.  So what if our universe is the same?  What if God is like a game designer, and we souls are merely players?  And when we die, game over.  Of course, I'm not saying God is some geek behind a computer with a degree in CGI rendering, but something much more complex and profound that it shatters our understanding.

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Anyway,that's just the basic premise of it.  But the reason these people have a wormhole drive now is because when they both met, Earthlings were what physicists today would call a Type 1 race -- able to completely manipulate their planet in every way, and just branching out into space (which will truly be us in about 2100 A.D.) -- and these other alien humans would be just barely a Type 2 race -- harnessed their planet, out into their own star system, and just barely getting into interstellar travel.  After First Contact, the two learned how to communicate and combined their races for centuries to go on.  And that's where we begin, with a human of Earth origin, and a human of alien origin, serving on the same crew, have a sort of back-and-forth throughout the novel, discussing this theory of virtuality while the story progresses.

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And while they fly on, eventually they get stranded, but figure out the"Virtuality" that's outside their own universe, and arrive at a planet that is in our Solar System.  But here's where it gets a bit "blow your mind"-ish...  In the novel, I make sure to never say that either of these people come from planets called Earth or systems like the Solar System.  I merely added that here so you guys would have a base to work from.

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Anyway, that's my story.  So what do you think?  By the way, if anyone's got a better title than Behind Reality, please speak up.  Because so far it's either that or the title "Virtuality."

Thanks, everyone!"

Anyway, I've already started work on that, and it's progressing much better than I first presumed.

I finally got to start reading Syd Field's "Screenplay: The Foundation of Screenwriting" today, and, man, this guy is awesome.  Syd Field really is the kind of guy I can identify with when it comes to screenwriting.  He talks about a class of students that he had before he wrote the book, and he described them all as those who "had a story, but didn't know how to write it."  And that's been me for a really long time now when it's come to writing.  So, perhaps, this book will also help me in the novel writing department.

Next up, just before going to sleep last night, I remembered that my buddy that drives me to scripture study every morning was listening to Michael Jackson for a few mornings recently, and I realized that Michael Jackson was a fantastic musician.  So I went to beemp3.com and downloaded me a hefty helping of M.J. music, including Billie Jean, Ain't No Sunshine, Beat It and all the other classics.  Never have I heard such an oddly talented artist before.

Well, that's it for this post.  More later.

- N.S.

OK, so for the past few days my interest has been entirely consumed by a concept for a theoretical spacecraft that was designed by Charles Pellegrino and Jim Powell.  It's a farily complex concept, but this page gives a fairly decent gist of it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A11949195=BBC

Basically it's an interstellar spacecraft that can travel at 92% the speed of light, which is pretty freakin' fast.  Since we cannot break the light barrier, the Valkyrie is going to allow us to travel relatively quicker to star systems than many of its ancestors' concepts.  By 2070(-ish) we should have at least one Valkyrie flying through space.  But I've been researching this spacecraft for a script idea.  Want to see what I've worked out?  So far, I've got the concept of the ship down to a T, but this is where it gets crazy.  When a crew of a spaceship is accelerated to that great of speed, a phenomenon known as "time dilation" begins to occur.  It is when time literally moves slower to this crew than it does outside of the spaceship.  Here are the numbers.

The Epsilon Eridani Star System is 10.8 light years away (63,489,204,000,000 miles away)

The Valkyrie is traveling at 0.92c (171,120 miles per second) (C = speed of light)

By Earth's perspective, the Valkyrie will arrive at Epsilon Eridani within 11.74717 years.

By the Valkyrie crew's perspective, they will arrive at Epsilon Eridani within 4.23271 years.

This was all calculated using what is called the Lorentz Term.

Those are the cliff notes...

On a less grim note, my screenwriting extraordinaire in Las Angeles finally got into contact with me, and we got to chate each other up about screenwriting.  He gave a me a list of places I could try for doing internships or even work along the lines of screenwriting, and he also suggested a series of fantastic scripts that I should read.  In all, it was a pretty great series of emails, and I now have another contact in hollywood, so yay!

Anyway, that's it for now.  I'll make a bigger post sometime later.

- N.S.

This is just a quick entry, so stick with me.

OK, so the movie "9" is coming out this next Wednesday, and it looks fairly promising.  Something you may not have known is that it was completely based on a short film of the same name, created by Shane Acker.

Check it out.

The entire movie looks pretty great.

Tonight I went to go see "Julie & Julia," and it was pretty excellent.  In my honest opinion, I thought it was a fairly sweet movie, worth seeing, and worth revisiting.  There are a few parts in the movie that literally made me almost jump out of my chair, like when Julia compares a hot food to... well... a certain male area that I'm not at liberty to type out...  But I really did love this movie.  It wasn't a chick flick, but it wasn't a guy flick.  ANd for those of you who think it is indeed a chick flick, think of this: "Those who divide movies into guy flicks and chick flicks don't really go to movies often."  I have to say that it's worth the horrible pricing of the nearby Cinemark.

Alright, that's pretty much it.  I got to get some sleep before I pass out on the keyboard.  Via con dios.

- N.S.