Click here to read Part I

My pen-mates are arranging themselves on their pallets when Yandi and I return to the great room. It’s ten minutes to 6:00. The baby-faced warden is still positioned by the door, a few yards from the blue dumpster. Yandi winks at him as we walk in and then saunters off to help the kitchen workers fix our plates.

Even though the menu never changes, an excited murmur fills the air as meal time nears. It’s one of the few bright spots in our day, aside from our daily sun hour and the oil bath.

I don’t have an appetite, but I accept the plate handed to me by a young Latina with a rose tattoo on her neck. She looks close to my age and she averts her eyes, almost apologetic, as she passes out the food. Dinner is avocados and nuts with an unappetizing slab of haddock in the middle. I’m still shaken from the horrors I witnessed in the Assembly Room, but I have to stay calm. I can’t let on that I know.

Sensing someone staring at me, I look up, locking eyes with Fern. She isn’t eating either. She stirs the tiny mountain of avocado mush with her finger. I don’t want to think about Fern, Grace or any of my pen-mates stretched out on racks – stretched to snapping – like flightless bats. I prefer to think of the teen somewhere coasting down the sidewalk on her skateboard.

“You gonna eat that?”

It’s Leticia, a Modern Coffee sitting to my right. She gestures to the fish on my plate. I pick up the lukewarm fillet and hand it to her. Our fingers touch.

“I was going to ask you for that.” Robyn, a dark-brown girl, sits across from me, watching the exchange. Her hair is starting to grow back in, black and bristly. She purses her lips like a child, although she’s at least eighteen. “You gave ‘Ticia your fish last night.”

“Closed mouth don’t get fed,” Leticia says. As she stuffs fish in her mouth, I scrutinize her face, her head. Leticia’s naked scalp bears twin ridges near her hairline, one on each side of her temple, about several inches long. Those dents could be scars left over from infancy, the result of forceps used during a difficult delivery.

I glance around the room at the bald heads of my pen-mates, as if I can glean the story of their lives from a scab or keloid. Can they interpret my scars? You can tell by the way some girls duck their head when you speak to them that they are more embarrassed by the absence of hair than they are by the absence of clothes.

I wish I could clothe them all, some new skin, impervious to branding and scraping and pickling. I wish I could offer them something more than day-old fish and rough cotton bedding fresh from the dryer. I wish we didn’t have to watch the sunset through the windows of a former guitar factory, where the only music is the buzzing and whirring of machines in the belly of a building with a lust for our blood.

Click here to download Part II

The Moon’s orbit about the Earth is not perfectly circular, so that at different times the Moon can be slightly closer or further away than usual. This composite shot shows the progress of an annular eclipse in May 2013. Credit: Jia Hao | The National Maritime Museum | Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2013

Space.com: Solar Eclipse Will Transform Sun into 'Ring of Fire' Next Week, Geoff Gaherty

Hey BSFS! 

For those of you who know me, you know that not only do I write sci-fi and fantasy, but I also do artwork -most of it being of characters and places in my stories.  If you check out some of the picture postings on my page, you'll see some of my work, and if you've been following my webcomic, Wild Space Saga, then you've gotten a pretty good taste of it.  

So, I'm writing this because I'm offering commission work.  I've decided that my money needs require that I start plying my trade.  I offer commission work IRL as well, but of course the curse of the artist prevails (people balk once they realize you want them to pay you for your work).  So I'm hoping I can get some offers here on DA. 

I'm best at drawing characters; as you can see in my gallery, that's my strong suit.  I recommend you peruse my gallery in order to gauge my style before making an offer.  Unfortunately, I am not good at designing anything mechanical, so I will not accept requests for any kinds of vehicles or machines. And am only passable at drawing buildings, so I will have to consider the complexity of the design before I will accept this.

(As an aside, I'm just starting to learn how to render images using programs like Paint.net -You can see examples of those in my "My Alien Girlfriend" work on my main DeviantArt page, and my character designs in my Wild Space Saga Deviantart page  - so if you want those, we'll have to negotiate a generally higher price.)

Otherwise, my standard charges are as follows.  I charge $20 for black and white images (inked with shading by pencil), and $50 for color images (color pencil or Copics, though I am more skilled with color pencils), with $10 in advance for b&w and $20 in advance for color.  If a request goes outside of my comfort zone, I may charge more, but that is negotiable.  

I will accept 5 commissions (1 per person, please) this month with a deadline of May 20th for submissions, or until the quota is full -whichever comes first.  This is all I can do in a reasonable amount of time.  

So if you would like me to do a commission, please contact me here, or by e-mail at khyron20@gmail.com.  Thank you very much for your time, and I hope to get your patronage!  

-Brandon Hill

Here is my latest blog post and book review:

New Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novelist and Screenwriter, Colby R. Rice has a great debut novel on her hands.

Ghosts of Koa, the first novel in The Books Of Ezekiel, is set in a dystopian, urban-fantasy world dominated by political and social unrest of two factions. The Civil and Alchemic Order are those factions, human and magic (Alchemy) wielding others. Despite a truce between them, the behind the scene machinations of politicians and insurgents (Ghosts) threaten what civility exists. In the midst of violence, betrayal and daily survival is our teenage hero, Zeika Anon.

Read the rest here:

GHOSTS OF KOA by Colby R. Rice

Many authors create video trailers to promote their books. I created a trailer to spread the word about "The Baartman Bag," a short story I'm offering as a free download. I want to engage as many readers as possible about the issues black women face -- invisibility, hair, rage, identity, shadism. Because speculative fiction is my thing, the video embodies the creepy, the bizarre and the provocative. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Source: Solid State Technology

Satlz TPM

Ibid

MIT Technology Review: A Dropbox for the Internet of Things, David Talbot

Kepler-186f, shown in this artist’s concept, is the first Earth-sized planet discovered in its star’s habitable zone. Credit: NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech

Discovery: Possibly Habitable Earth-Sized Planet Discovered, Bill Andrews

The Baartman Bag is a serial short story told in four parts. In a futuristic society, black teen girls are abducted, taken to a slaughterhouse and skinned to make couture purses. One young woman decides to fight back.

First, they lop off your head. Then they saw off your arms and legs – body parts as valuable as dust – until only your naked torso remains. While you are still warm, before your blood knows it’s dead, they shear the skin from your back, breasts and belly with a great whirring blade, careful to preserve your flesh in whole swathes.

Or so the story goes. I have never witnessed the actual process for transforming a black girl into a couture bag.

I was brought to the slaughterhouse, a place my pen-mate Grace calls “the Carvery,” in May. It’s August now. From the outside, the worn aluminum building resembles a post-modern dorm. But only from the outside. Dusty sunlight streams through the small windows that span the length of the great room where about two hundred girls dress, eat and sleep. The slaughterhouse was once a guitar factory. Sometimes when I’m sweeping around our pallets, running my broom along the baseboards, a long-forgotten string or tuning peg gets entangled in the straws.

At eighteen, I’m older than most of the other girls, who range in age from thirteen to nineteen. Our skin tones span the dusky rainbow – from rose brown to plum black. Kunteé believed wealthy patrons of the Baartman bag would be charmed if the purse were available in exotic shades. He labels our complexions Sienna Madre, Tawny Hubris, Modern Coffee and Ghana. The darker the girl, the more premium the purse.

Yandi, a sullen nineteen-year-old, has been here the longest. She’s a Ghana. She likes to whisper about the horrors involved in manufacturing a human bag, blood-soaked tales of skinning and curing that make the younger girls cry. “They drug you first,” Yandi assures the wide-eyed captives as she walks through the great room handing out bedding. “You won’t feel a thing when they chop your head off. Then they soak your skin in salt water to keep it fresh.”

With her dark complexion, the color of mulberries wilting on the vine, Yandi’s bag would have fetched a high price had she not developed a severe case of eczema during her second month at the Carvery. Instead of hanging her in the yard, as they did to ruined inventory, our captors kept her on. She now serves as a warden.

We never know when our time is coming, when we’ll be sent to the blades. Most of us aren’t here longer than three or four months. One day, you’ll see a girl talking in the yard or strapped down in the oil bath and then you’ll wake up to an empty pallet next to yours. Then more girls are brought in to take their place. I’m number 1815. I have never seen the four numerals seared into the skin behind my ear but I trace the keloid every day with my fingers, rubbing its raised permanence.

Click here to download your free copy of Part I of The Baartman Bag!

As I read the agreeable and insightful blog by Bro. Clifton McMillan Jr. some thoughts came to mind.

http://blacksciencefictionsociety.com/profiles/blogs/my-personal-warning-concerning-technology-and-preparing-for?xg_source=activity

The show Revolution deals with this, as well as, many other media presentations. I am very much into technology, but I have been knowing what he writes for decades.

One of the things that I promote is everyone having a frame of reference from which to understand/overstand reality. Mine is a Afrocentric one-a balance of old and new, past-present and future being cyclical, logic and intuition in harmony and a dissertation worth of many other ideologies.

With that being said, it gives me a different view of things. People's reliance on technology to the point of forgetting basic survival and trade skills is by design. We were mostly rural folks in our beginnings here. We knew about bartering, trade crafts and the whole. We were lured into cities by promises of an easier life for our children and ourselves.

Families in rural areas could support themselves because they controlled their own means of food production. You could have large families of 10-20 people and get by. You could barter for goods and service you did not produce with neighbors. We built our own homes. I remember my mom telling me how my grandmother added a room to her house by herself.

It was much more limited living in cities. Whites controlled food production, most of the jobs and we paid rent for substandard living conditions. Those were some of the major things that facilitated the break down of Black families. After making it more and more difficult for Black men to make livable wage they offered Black women monetary support, if they got rid of the Black men. Hence the welfare system. Welfare was already in place for White women who lost their husbands to war and other misfortunes. Our caveat was to break up with each other in order to survive. Always different rules for us having access to that which was available to them.

The amount vagrancy laws and such that they created just for us and other well known injustices made it possible for us to adopt an unofficial slogan in our communities as stated by Papa Pope in the TV show Scandal, " We must work twice as hard to accomplish half as much as White folks"(paraphrase).

My point is this, Yes we can accomplish whatever we desire, but we have to be ever mindful that out sense of time, production schedule, resources and delays cannot ever be compared to Whites and Asians. They do not operate with the level of intentional distractions - both internal and external - that we operate with, so we cannot place ourselves within their frame of reference when plotting our goals . We have a different view of fairness, work ethic, spirituality and logic. It is imperative that we start to overstand that being "different" is not a four letter word(profane). There IS such a thing as "acting Black" just as there is such a thing as "acting White" that is devoid of the narrowly analyzed, conditioned, negative, Pavlovian responses we spout out when we hear those terms.

Fact, billions of dollars are spent researching, categorizing and exploiting African culture. IF we were all the same, then there would be no reason for the Europeans here and in Europe and the Chinese/Japansese to spend such large sums of money. They would already know because it would a part of their way of thinking.

We have unique gifts that we use daily, but don't see them as such, because we think it is a part of everyone's way of thinking, despite the "others" only giving lip service to it and we being the only ones living by them.

Arabs in control of the regions of Egypt do not know how the pyramids were built. Europeans have sent their best and brightest and most advanced equipment and could not figure it out. So have the so-called smartest folks in the world, the Asians. That leaves us.

Within our physical, mental and spiritual DNA are the origins of civilization and the still labelled mysteries of the ancient world. Info that Whites and Asians, again by spending what could amount to billions of dollars, will use to advance their future. They study and exploit our past for their future progress while conditioning us to "forget the past and look to the future" All of the present and future is a modification of the past.

If we are spending our waking days trying to imitate and assimilate then we will never be able to BE ourselves, just a poor imitation of "others".

Despite us thinking we need to get with their program to progress, we are literally holding ourselves back and limiting ourselves by working within their box. Even outside their box is still using their box as a frame of reference.

We have a cirlce. Our own circle, from which to overstand reality. One that is filled with the solutions to our problems of self-hatred, economic, political and social stagnation and psychotic reliance on peoples that will never appreciate who we are because doing so will jeopardize their power.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

― Frederick Douglass

Kujichagulia (Self-Determination)

To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined, named, created and spoken for by "others".

Unconditional Love to my Sisters and Brothers always and forever,

...the Calm before the Storm

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10203527247562219&set=vb.1245249671&type=2&theater&notif_t=like

Words, I swear to god the trouble they've caused. I awake every morning with questions that torment me. The who, why, how, when of everything unanswered. They taught me to read and write but were more interested in content and context, what I read or didn't read. They taught me to recognize what the marks on paper meant, actually it was an initiation into the foolishness of words. Starting with children's books I learned to open my mind to the foolishness to come. I didn't know words could lie so unashamedly. Behind the mask of ego and motive, like a magicians slight of hand, the amusing joke, I'm doubled-over in laughter while going to my slaughter. Words can kill, damn, I thought words were innocent, some fool said "if".

Words are coined for schools of thought. The more immersed in the school the more serious the words. For a truth, I tell you this surely must be the truth because I so thoroughly believe it to be true. Others from the first written to the contemporary have verified it to be so and all other words are incarnations of evil set to confuse or destroy the believers of the truth. Why isn't the truth itself is destroyed, why the believers of the truth are destroyed? It is because words for and against must occupy the same space. We don't care about the question in question, we care about the words. Oh, how we revere words.

Words are a formula expressed to convey and communicate to others but in the fact that a person can communicate one thing and think another, words are highly suspect. The alien with a big zipper on his forehead, unzipped to reveal a big honking eye, his jaw automatically locked, the full spectrum of his data stream into my mind and I knew his intent, motive and reason, not a word was spoken. I felt like god had descended and swept away years of nonsense, the years of interpretive equations for every occasion and defensive quips to hide my fears. Oh the elation of pure knowledge that stopped all the human foolishness that has enveloped me. I am sure I must tell others.

Words, just words, like other words. My cousin James was abducted by aliens, he said. Oh, they had something about that on TV the other night. What you been smok'n mon? I am a _______________ and we don't believe in that, if you read the _____________you'd know god's word. God's got a mouth now, has lips, speaks words. His words, even if you repeat them are powerful words.

The mind is powerful in how it perceives and believes, conceives and receives, can also deceive and be deceived. Words themselves are the power. They strike the mind through the eye ports, the ear port, the mouth port. Thus we are mostly blind, deaf and dumb by reason of all the words we are bombarded with and the constructs of their definitions we exist in.

He's well read, is a man of letters, has a way with words, is a word mister, a word smith, is a walking lexicon and a con-artist. He is who said it first, coined the word, defined the word and redefined the expression. It's all about the words. Words are the real weapon. Like in Star Wars and every street fight, you play the dozens, can't settle it, then break out the fisticuffs or light sabers or guns. I see we can't settle this with our knowledge of the force (words), have to use the elegant weapons of a more civil time, bashing with stones, swords, throwing bullets, arrows, rockets, packets of erroneous data and viruses, sanctions, all the other things we do to each other because our words have less power that another's words. And it is because our words do not match our reasons and motives. The same is true for both sides. How in the heck can we move forward if our words were true? Both sides ask the same question. On this planet, words are the problem.

A picture speaks a thousand words. We should all be artist. There would be less need to speak. Oh, I forgot, we don't see eye to eye either.

Robot suit: An exoskeleton on display in Brazil is designed to be worn, and controlled, by a paralyzed person.

MIT Technology Review:
World Cup Mind-Control Demo Faces Deadlines, Critics
A Brazilian neuroscientist says brain-controlled robotics will let the paralyzed walk again. By Antonio Regalado

Left: Snapshot of the simulation system. The (20, 20) type carbon nanotube (CNT) combined with two graphite sheets (cyan) solved in a periodic water box represents a nanometre water channel, and a polymer-functionalized nanoparticle (NP) is driven through it by an external electric field. Right: The NP structures with different polymer length and number, and the polymer terminal is charged (green).

Nanotech Web: Determining the translocation of nanoparticles

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