Mass Effect Unlimited

I'm sure the internet as a collective entity is already well aware of this, but Photoshop is awesome. Yes, it's created unrealistic standards of physical attractiveness and all that, but it's also given us things like Napoleon Bonaparte riding a T-Rex, or the Iron-Bat Suit.

Having gained access to Photoshop (and been given rudimentary lessons by the guy sitting next to me) I've been able to tinker around and create a few images that make me smile. So I thought I'd share them all with you, my readers. All eleven of you.

Now that's putting a team together.

Phoenix Creation Journal #2

Time travel is a big part of my writings and as such, so are time travelers. Within the constraints of the Adventurverse, time travelers are not just people who have traveled in time. They are in fact an entirely separate species, chrono sapiens.

Chrono sapiens are not the only beings capable of surviving time travel. Both they and humans can survive being dislocated in time, and both species require special equipment in order to do so, though humans generally suffer a greater degree of physical stress during trips through the time stream.

The biggest and most universal difference between time travelers and humans though is that time travelers have an inherently unstable connection to the time stream, whereas humans have a linear, unbreakable tether to the time stream. This means that, while both species can survive time travel, only chrono sapiens can survive paradoxes. 

Time travel can put the whole of the time stream into a state of flux. As events are altered, the changes ripple outward and time instaneously rewrites itself and everything connected to it to accomadate the changes in history. Because chrono sapiens have an unstable connection to time, they don't get rewritten if history does. 

The next big difference is that time travelers often, with the aid of future technology, manifest time manipulation powers that vary wildly in strength, precision, and effect. Abilities can include but in are in no way limited to the ability to:

• Slow time's relative passage for an object or objects
• Accelerate time's relative passage for an object or objects
• Send something backward along its personal timeline
• Heal wounds by restoring flesh to a state prior to injury
• See into the relative future
• Slow or reverse the aging process
• Sense an object's history by touch

Time travelers can manifest these abilities using special technology that allows them to focus the background radiation they naturally acquire during time travel. The more they travel, the stronger they become. Not all time travelers can harness every ability. In fact, most only really learn one or two, if any. Many never learn any. Ooh. That rhymed.

Crackpot Theory: Sharknado Explained

For those of you who don't know, Sharknado and its sequel, Sharknado 2: The Second One are two of the absolutely dumbest, most horrendously written and shot movies ever, of all time. It takes the "so bad it's good" trope to extremes never before conceived by human imagination. I couldn't stop smiling while watching either of them, even when the sequel was just a tad in love with itself.

Full disclosure, at time of writing, I actually haven't watched the sequel in its entirety. It was late at night when we started watching it, I had somewhere to be in the morning, and I wasn't about to be late because I stayed up watching literally the dumbest thing to be called entertainment since that brick in Phineas and Ferb.

But from what I did see, the movie seemed to be hinting that these sharks that were falling through the sky were in fact intelligent, actually seeming to recognize particular humans as targets and perhaps even bent on revenge. This idea was so much more stupid than the existing stupid premise that I had to concoct a justification for it or less lobotomize myself with the TV remote.

And in doing so, I struck brilliance. For you see, in the last days of World War Two, what few Nazis remained used their last bits of science to escape capture by transposing their consciousnesses into the bodies of sharks. Then they spent years breeding new, equally intelligent Nazi Sharks, all the while plotting their revenge against the allies.

This plan would eventually manifest itself as the Nazi Sharks built Nazi Shark machines that could control the weather. It was this, and not the previously theorized global warming, that caused the freak weather patterns necessary for the sharknado storms to form. And so, the Nazi Sharks used their Nazi Shark machines to create freak weather patterns that they could ride inland in order to attack United States coastal cities!

Think about it. It all makes sense now doesn't it? What everyone thought was just a really stupid disaster movie was in fact...and equally stupid Nazi conspiracy movie!

It's a theory, anyway. Cheers.

Phoenix Creation Journal #1

For those of you who don't know, Project Phoenix Agent 003 is my primary alias on the internet. I first used the name on my fanfiction profile, carried it over to fictionpress, and even adopted a shorthand version, PhoenixAgent003, for use in online gaming.

The story behind the name is a bit of a long one, but it's one I may as well tell here and now just to get it out of the way. 

In sixth grade, my young mind concocted a science fiction story that I very originally titled Project Phoenix. At the time, my only justification for the name was that it sounded cool. It took heavy inspiration from things I was into at the time, namely Call of Duty, Star Wars, and Aaron Stone. Partly to create an inside joke and partly because it was easier, I based the three main characters off of my best friend, my crush, and myself.

The character I based off myself was Erin Mikes (later changed to Eric because I found out Erin was a girl's name), Agent 003 of the planetary crimefighting organization Project Phoenix. I poured quite a lot of creative energy into the world, planning out the storylines of no less than six books with a list of ideas for about thirty additional, shorter stories on standby. I thought up five hundred years of human history (although it was mostly filled with wars thanks to my still looming obsession with shooters), created dozens of sci-fi weapons, and invented a breed of indestructible, metallic space zombies.

Looking back on it, it was all kind of terrible, filled with flat, boring characters and far too serious a tone for the ludicrious action proposed by it. To say nothing of my appalling attempts to make more mature stories and characters while I myself was still the furthest one could be from maturity unless you count infants. But I give it points for being the one of the only original stories I ever finished that was longer than six pages.

I held off on sending out the thing for publishing after realizing just how terrible it was, but I was a bit too invested in the idea to completely abandon it, so instead, I started tweaking it. My first tweaks made things more militaristic and political (or as political as seventh grade writing could get), but soon after everything started fluxing as I started mashing up ideas, changing settings, ditching characters and creating new ones.

The only real constants through the ever evolving project were the three original main characters. There was Eric, aka Agent 003, who was my initial stand-in; Chloe aka Agent 002, who I modeled after my first girlfriend; and Ray, the analog to one of my best childhood friends. And even those three characters changed, evolving beyond their original inspirations and becoming people all their own. I still identified Eric as being loosely based off of me, but in his current incarnation he and I aren't really that alike (though we'd probably get along).

Even with all of this, I was determined to make a story about these three. And so, I took up Eric's code designation as my online alias as a permanent link, and have been running with it (and the story) ever since.

In future journal entries, I'll talk a lot more about what I'm doing with the current version of Project Phoenix  (or, Forged in Fire, as its current working title reads), the characters, the setting, and what not. But I felt like I needed to start by talking about its roots. So, there you go.

Until next time, this is Agent 003, signing off.

Lazy Sunday Post: Alternate Alliteration Appellations

For those of you who care to notice that sort of thing, there's a small, blatantly obvious bit of alliteration in the description of the blog. It's a fairly short, vague description, since I really can't be bothered to do the professional thing and pick a theme and/or focus of this blog so early in its life span lest I preemptively limit my creative options.

There were a lot of rhetorical repetition runners-up though. Here were some of the others phrases I almost used to describe the blog:

• The internet's home of wit, wisdom, and whimsy. 
• An electronic entryway into eccentricity.
• Freaks, free spirits, and the Finnish need not apply.
• Making mindless men meet middle mark expectations since 2002.

Okay, so I was only really thinking of using that first one and just came up with the others to stall for space. Sue me.

No really, I dare you. Waste all your money on a lawyer to get blood from a turnip. I'm so broke, mosaic artwork once offered me bandaging. Zing!