Plasma, Leaks, Tidbits, and a Story

In a year full of the improbable, have some of the perhaps...

May 10, 2024 - when the improbable became real - Aurora Borealis as seen and photographed in Mid-California by Jenifer Hanen, aka Ms. Jen, in Coleville, CA with her Nikon D850 on a tripod.

As we wrap up 2024 and start the countdown to family freakout dinner, oops - I mean Christmas, I find myself having lots of web related adventures (not meltdowns but opportunities) and no real essay for you all this week. Truly, you don’t want me to write about Custom DNS troubles, Google reporting password leaks but not where they were leaked, among other mid-December delights.

Instead, I have a list of links that I have collected in the last few weeks for your reading pleasure and a story that I wrote in 2017 that is now slightly freshened up by some of the conjecture around last week’s New Jersey is it a Drone or is it Plasma or is it a UFO????

Tidbits for your Pleasure:

Flash Fiction prompts to help you get through to the end of the year. Flash fiction can be as long as a few of paragraphs and short as a Tweet. The Art of Flash Fiction has given us 15 prompts as a sort of creative end of the year advent calendar wherein you open the doors and have fun.

How to Verify your BlueSky account if you have your own website/domain - this is a great idea from a branding and SEO perspective but rather a bad idea if the Custom DNS at your registrar is not currently on speaking terms with the SSL certificate at your server. If you are a DNS wizard, please feel free to have a good laugh at my expense as msjen.com is down. The support folks at the registrar and server seem to be out at a holiday party…

Just in time, too, as I just upgraded my Kirby license so I could use the holidays in a proper time honored web design / web dev fashion - redesign & recode my website!

The brain microbiome: could understanding it help prevent dementia? If true, this could be a huge game changer, not just for folks with early onset but folks like my 81 year old mom whose dental implants gave her a year plus long fungal infection and now she is struggling with memory issues.

The “oldest known alphabetic writing”, dated to 2400 BCE and written on clay cylinders, has been discovered in a tomb at Tell Umm-el Marra, in Syria. After the line break and the TV show review, plus other interesting links for folks who love history. Last autumn, I found myself on a bit of a research bender around very old alphabets from Asia Minor and the Levant. I still find it very interesting.

This sour cream apple pie recipe sounds interesting if you enjoy baking pies! As a celiac / gluten-free person, I have only met one gluten-free pie crust that was any decent and that cousin passed before sharing her gf pie making secrets!

A new Oort Cloud Comet commeth our way! Hopefully it will be as delightful as October’s comet. Comet ATLAS (C/2024 G3) Kicks off the New Year — What to Expect

Time and Kebabs, a Discworld fic about that time that Lord Vetinari and Death met up, a thread by John Bull.

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Improbable or Possible?

Admit it, you found yourself this last week watching some of the videos of drones that were circling New Jersey that some folks called weird and then there were photos & videos of orbs of plasma. It was good fun and before all the skeptics had proper time to debunk each and every video clip as an airplane, a drone, a blob on your camera lens, etc. the US government said it was prototypes of military drones being tested near a military base.

Now as someone who has spent many evenings in the deserts of California taking photos of the sky, I have yet to see something that I would call an UFO or UAP. I have seen the military trot out new aircraft and big drones (the ones that drop bombs). I don’t take photos of them.

But before I turn dull and boring in your email, here have a journal article from The Journal of Modern Physics on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Extraterrestrial Life, Plasmoids, Shape Shifters, Replicons, Thunderstorms, Lightning, Hallucinations, Aircraft Disasters, Ocean Sightings (official journal article name).

Or has I shortened it to: UAPs and Plasma!

Have fun reading it. If you like it and wish to dip your toes a bit deeper into the tidal zone between Plasma Physics and conspiratainment, may I recommend Robert Temple’s new book: The New Science of Heaven.

Before your head explodes in either delight or debunking, ever since I read Terry Bisson’s Meat I have been very interested in the narrative possibilities around sentient plasma. Yes, plasma - one of the four states of matter - as a whole ecosystem of sentient life forms, separate from our carbon based world that we live in, that lives along side of us and around us that we do not currently comprehend.

In 2016, my brain delivered me a whole set of scenarios about the Life and Times of a Young Plas. The following story is the first vignette in a cross-over between my ideas of Young Plas, Pride & Prejudice, all inspired by Bisson’s Meat…