Critical Thinking

One more thing about setting. I just finished HG Wells’s The Invisible Man. The story, of course, is about an invisible man who wanders around, trying to find himself. (Ha-ha-ha! I kill me.) Story-wise, it was all right. A bit disjointed. But what impressed me was how much Wells thought about exactly what it would be like to be invisible. Clothes show, of course, but so do fingernails and recently digested food and dirt on one’s feet. Walking down stairs takes concentration, because you can’t see where your foot is in relation to the next step. We don’t get to see exactly what the public’s reaction to an average invisible man would be since the man in question is such an…unpleasant person. And I wondered, did men in England in that time have really tough feet? Because his feet were rarely mentioned considering how much walking and running he did outside. But the story was a really interesting example of both getting into the head of a character and watching that character react with his environment.

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-=ad=- has offered up his story "Questions" to be torn apart/adored by millions. You can find it in the Yahoo! Group. Check it out. Come up with your own ideas and insights. I'll add my thoughts next week.

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A month from tomorrow will be Maj Tom’s retirement ceremony. I’m really not sure where those last seven years went. We’re on opposing schedules in the excitement/freak-out cycle. And neither one of us can figure out why no one takes him seriously when he says he wants to work at Starbucks. Do they not understand how much we spend there? Our interactions with our environments are about to change drastically. It should get interesting.

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Oh! Did you see this? I saw an article a couple of years ago about printing plastic, but this is seriously cool. Imagine if burn patients didn’t need cadaver skin or skin shaved off of their legs. They just offer a few cells and get it printed on. It’ll be interesting to see if it works with bone. Will the replicator be far behind?

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