April Fool's!

Yay! XD

Well, Friday was my birthday. Good ole' March 30! My parents took me to dinner and a comedy club, Bananas, to see Dustin Diamond. You know, Screech from Saved by the Bell! It was great! ^_^ I'm 21 now, so I got to order some champagne, but that was pretty much it for me. Malinda wanted me to get something else too, but after she let me taste her Vodka and Tonic (good lord that was the most disgusting thing I've ever tasted!) I decided to stick with ice water.

Today, we're having a birthday party for me! =D That means everybody's coming over and hanging out at my house, eating, and probably playing Counterstrike and Mario Kart. I cleaned my room (I mean REALLY cleaned... like, swept behind my TV clean!) yesterday just for that reason. Today, I finally wrote some more of my book (I've been lazy and having actually written anything since Tuesday. So much for the schedule! ><() ). 1,294 words! That's the most I've written since I finished Chapter 14 MONTHS ago! XD

On a slightly unrelated note, I've finally come up with new material for my Future History timeline, which you can find here: Earth 2001 - 2150. Right now, the timeline only goes up to the year 2080 and is nowhere near complete, I'm constantly trying to come up with stuff to sprinkle throughout the timeline. The newest stuff I've devised should help me finish up the 21st century and stretch through 2120. I really like this timeline... to me at least, it feels like how things might actually play out. My philosophy for this: everything and nothing changes. While new crises and technology might appear, humanity doesn't change and we're afflicted with the same problems and try the same tactics as we always have. Also, nothing happens quickly. I've decided to adopt the advice of somebody else on the AH forum (wow, I feel like such an ass for forgetting his name! ><() ), and try to apply this rule of thumb: take your initial assumptions for how long something should happen and multiply by three. Expect human-level AI in 30 years? Multiply by 3, you get the first conscious AI around 2090, which when taken with everything else really does seem more plausible. I need to work out a few lingering kinks, such as details of South America's unification, religious changes, and weather patterns, but generally I think I've managed to really give the impression of a realistic multi-polar world.

Eventually, I'd like to expand the timeline past 2150 into the era of interstellar travel, but that's likely going to be way off. For example: while many sci-fi stories and FH timelines have Mars colonized by the late 21st/early 22nd century, I'm finding it difficult to get anything more than a token population to the Red Planet by 2150. I've decided I'll use the English colonization of the Americas as an example, so while there are a half-dozen outposts at the end of the 21st century, we should have at least a few permanent colonies by 2300.

Well, it sound like the guests are starting to waltz in. Gotta go!