2PhatGeeks.com

Time for a Change

As I’ve posted here before, I’ve been a conservative for a very very long time. Without going into too much fine detail my primary reasons center around less intrusive government and lower taxes. Basically, I’m the kind of conservative that doesn’t care whether you screw 6 hookers high on shrooms as long as you keep my taxes low and don’t expect me to pay for your health care.

Until recently I have considered the quest to keep government out of our lives more important than other considerations and have sided with the party most likely to do this. Each party or liberal/conservative leaning has it’s drawbacks. Conservatives are just fine as frog’s hair when it comes to proselytizing from the bench as long as fetuses are involved. Liberals would preach from the white house on pretty much every issue except drugs and abortion. I took the lesser of two evils and stayed with the party that at least pretended to be interested in keeping government small and out of my face.

Well, I believe the time has come to re-evaluate how and for whom I vote. Over the past few years I’ve watched more and more press and blogs talking about atheist rights and watched the greater community react. During my observations I’ve noted that the frequency and intensity of the attacks on atheists increasing. Members of our government are simply allowed to tell us we don’t matter… or worse, are dangerous… without fear of reprisal or even a slap on the wrist from the greater community. Our rights can openly be questioned and no one even seems to notice.

There is not a single atheist running for president that I’ve been able to find. Even the “Best-we-can-do-party,” the Libertarians, are nominating the openly religious Barr. Hell the guy even tried to ban witchcraft! And not because it’s silly, but because it’s “satanic” and his imaginary friend doesn’t like that. It has been established that the majority of Americans would rather vote for a gay scientologist than an atheist regardless of what the person’s stances were. How insane is this? And how is it that I don’t get a benefit or some sort of special parking space?

Well, for what it’s worth, I think it’s time for a change. As Atheists we cannot simply keep supporting people that actually believe in mythology just because they agree with something else we like or support. How can you support a man or woman that wants to teach our children Intelligent design just to keep your taxes low? How selfish is it to ignore the fact that a man says he’s going “to do God’s work,” just because we like the healthcare package he’s pushing? How can we hold ourselves out to be better than the militant Islamists when we ignore the fact that most of our country actually believes Jonah was swallowed by a whale and that Noah fit two (or more) of all the animals in the world in a boat? Is getting 72 virgins for blowing yourself up really so crazy an idea in comparison?

So, beginning with this election, I have decided I cannot and will not support any believer of any religion regardless of their stances. The bare minimum a thinking person can ask of their candidate is that they don’t believe in some imagined grand-father or -mother in the sky. As with all such decisions, they are pretty meaningless if only followed through by one individual. However, estimates of the Atheist population of the US are somewhere around 7%-10%, making us a potentially powerful voting bloc, especially in this age of races decided by less than 2%. The more of us that use the power of the vote to encourage more rational leaders rather than the ID crowd the better off we’ll all be.

This November, I’ll be writing in my vote.

Don’t put your dreams on a shelf.

Three years ago, give or take a few days, my husband Shawn took me on a spring vacation and made one of my dreams come true.

Born and raised in Nova Scotia, Canada, I was a little girl predisposed to dreaming about the cliché princess’ and there’s no place better for a princess-at-heart than Disney, in Orlando, Florida.

The problem then, of course, was that I lived thousands of miles away. The dream and the chance to realize it was extremely remote. Even after I had met and married Shawn, we simply couldn’t afford to visit Disney until one dreary, cold and rainy early spring weekend.

The weather was the furthest thing from my mind as we were driving underneath the bright, multi-colored sign with the worlds that made my heart skip a beat: The Magic Kingdom. Everywhere I looked, against the gray day a rainbow of every color possible sprinkled a lack-luster morning with the iconic symbol of the castle looming in my sights as we made quick time from parking lot to the river boat.

To say that I felt a little like a kid again right at that second as water sluiced against the white hull of the boat that took you from parking lot to the Magic Kingdom is a lot like saying the Pope may be a little Catholic. I felt my eyes begin to take on the stupefied, wide-eyed childish wonder at every thing I saw.

It was cold. It was ridiculously cold for a day in Florida, spring or not. I couldn’t feel my cheeks (which were curved upward permanently in Disney sugar coated excitement), my nose, or any of the ten fingers I was wriggling about in a poor, twenty six year old’s rendition of ecstatic puppy-wriggling excitement. We hadn’t planned for the rain and had forgotten our raincoats. Lucky for us, Disney supplied these plastic ponchos with happy little Mickey’s all over them so that I could run from one end of The World of Tomorrow to the other cackling with glee.

I was beside myself, and I wasn’t disappointed with anything. Not once—not even for a split second.

Now, some times I hear mumblings from unhappy little mouseketeers—Disney really is just a tourist trap, Disney isn’t that great, Disney is a horrible giant splash of marketing and isn’t what it used to be….And to those grumpy dwarves, I say take a flying leap from the top of the Swiss Family Robinson tree.

It’s an amusement park, of course it’s a brilliant splash of marketing, that’s how they make the money that delivers a one-of-a-kind experience to you. But, I can tell you with assurance and good authority that Disney is beyond freaking awesome at doing exactly what it promises to do: making your dreams come true. Everything around you is most likely for sale—but Disney isn’t cramming it down your throat and twisting your arm to buy that pink and blue Tinkerbelle hat with sparkles on it. Ahem. It’s there, but it’s not screaming. The Magic Kingdom is absolutely serious about making sure your dream remains true.

Next spring? We’re going again. I’ve been carefully, studiously preparing by letting myself get wound up at odd hours of the day, responding to half of what Shawn asks me with a hearty, “DISNEY!”

“Hun, have you seen my work shirt?”
“DISNEY!”
“Mel, do you know where I put the keys I—“
“DISNEY!”
“Are you excited about going to—“
“DISNEY!”

If you’re thinking about visiting Orlando, Florida to finally make that dream come true and visit the happiest place on earth, I recommend it. I recommend it so hard.

Don’t put it off until it’s too late. Start thinking about booking a dream vacation and follow through. You can even start with Trusted Tours & Attractions which can assist you with things to do in Orlando, Florida. And if you have enough time, there are a million other things for you to see in Orlando. Book a few sight seeing tours and visit Sea World, Discovery Cove, Medieval Times, Arabian Nights and just downtown Orlando in itself is a plethora of sights and memories awaiting to happen. While you’re in Orlando and thinking about branching out even more in an adventurous spirit, I suggest Miami and visiting the Miami Seaquarium.

Sign up for Trusted Tours & Attractions newsletter while you’re visiting and checking out their site, just for signing up you’ll be entered to win a handheld GPS before the offer ends on April 10th of this year.

Don’t let your dreams get muddled up in bills, the kids, and work. Take the time to make a memory that will last a life time. I did, and I can’t wait to do it again.

DISNEY!

The Penguin Thanks You All

Well Hey thar, interwebs! We just wanted to thank all of you that visited us yesterday on what became the busiest day at 2PhatGeeks. Between the Diggers and Stumblers and Reddit-ers, in a single day we doubled the traffic we’ve had since the site officially opened in March. As we’re both (obviously) new to this real blog thing-a-ma-bob, this is pretty big news for us.

A special shout out to the Reddit folks out there. Between some meaningful discussion about the topic at hand and some inferences that I have just never read a book before, the story was actually the number 1 in the gaming category on Reddit for a while.

Finally, I want to put out a very special thank you to the Reddit reader ColdSnickersBar that had this to offer.

And indeed I do…. waaaaaak waaak! Thanks, internet! You all made our day!

Triond: getting paid for my content, the virgin attempt.

We all know I’m not the world’s finest writer. I sentence fragment and splice as well as forget punctuation all the time but I can tell you what drives me nuts and keeps me from reading a blog and becoming one of those rare loyal readers we bloggers keep hearing about.

So I wrote an article about Five Reasons Why You Can’t Keep me as a Reader and submitted it to a website called Triond.

I’d recently discovered Triond via a random Stumble. Triond is a website for all kinds, genres and skills of writers to submit their writing and get paid 50% of the revenue generated. Of course, that depends on how popular the article becomes and how many people read it. So far, I’ve already one curmudgeonly response! I’m moving on up, baby!

It’s been fun writing until my face falls off, again. I haven’t spent this much time hammering away at the ol’ ivories in a very long time. Maybe it won’t make me perfect, it probably won’t make me amazing or breath taking either, but it’ll certainly help me grow and find my voice. That’s always a good step in the right direction!

Black Dawn Rising

This was done for a contest on Deviant Art. Inspired by this picture (click to peek) Night of the Dragon, by Mercuralis.

En’Kar had never been one to place his faith within intangible things. Yet, the strange prophecy which his mother lullaby-sang to him when he had been a child had begun to haunt his dreams with an alarming frequency. Night after night, he had been awoken with the melody overlapping pleasant dreams of his childhood. Running through his parents Holding, Nableen, bare foot and care free as any child—stealing into the heat of the kitchens for sweet meats, stalking the corridors for sand lizards—all of it had the overlapping strange, (and horribly written, he might add) little prophecy.

This night as he awoke, the desert’s frigid air prickled against his skin. It made the little hairs along his arms and at the back of his neck stand as if he had been too near a lightening strike. It was such an unpleasant experience it drove him from the under the safety of plush, velveteen purple blankets which kept the poisonous darvish bugs away. Even as he hissed faintly to himself in the shock of frozen marble floors to his bare feet—he could not quite chase away the horrid little stanza sung in his mother’s voice.

His room overlooking the vast desert of Katchyan afforded him a view he usually would have enjoyed. Moonlight almost as bright as sunrise flooded across barren sands; creating a world of silver for his eyes to feast upon as bare feet tapped quietly in the dampening silence of his room.

He simply stood on the cold tiles beneath him at first, gathering his bearings. The Holding slept, the building itself seemed to carry to him the very idea of slumber. Nothing much past the lowered murmurs of late night servants and the dimmest, indescribable sound of a place blanketed in dreams came to his ears after long moments.

En’Kar threw open the moon-flooded windows of his room, as it was as cold inside as it was out—and sent his mind as well as thoughts gently in tendrils out into the night. His thoughts carried memories of secrets; a golden egg buried deep within the castle, skinned knees, curious, unsteady little boy’s hands. Metallic shimmer, the smell that fire makes—

What is it, my Harrokoyayath?

The question and her voice flooded his mind with gentle concern. Harrokoyayath, she called him: Brother-of-Scales, in her language of teeth, blood and ashes. Even with a thought, her voice came sweet as honey, jagged as the fangs within her mouth.

There is something in the air. Something is about to happen, can you feel it?

Tenuous mental silence as he felt himself shudder slowly with the chill the air. Was it colder than usual, or was he imagining it?

I feel it, too, she answered him. She sounded distant, however, as if half of her mind had split from him to quest the night further. Put on something warmer than your sleeping wear, and come for a flight.

His lips twisted slightly in the usual admonishment from her.

I cannot think with so many minds around me, she added on.

He did not answer her, as she knew his response by heart.

___________________________________

She took him miles away, until the Holding of Nableen no longer loomed but seemed a small, tiny tower with a few unsteady lights from servants still burning in the windows. Its great needles stretched to impale a nearly silver-blue sky dotted with twinkling stars.

Her breath, like his, misted outward with each tuft of air they exhaled and mingled before disappearing into the vast empty desert which felt as if it crouched in waiting. In her silence, he adjusted the line of black tunic marked with his family emblem; the golden dragon spiraling down across the heart. Even through the leather of his gloves he could feel the shape of hand made embroidery, the irony of the symbol was not lost on him and it twisted his mouth in a private, sardonic line.

…It cannot be.

Those three words wiped the bitter smile forming and flooded his mind with emotions so black—so think and terrifying that if she had not have dampened the connection through the bond, he thought his skull might have cracked. The sheer terror which radiated from her still; coming in wafts and tendrils of smoke as well as burnt ash made his hand drop unconsciously to the Arcanyte blade at his hip. A gift from father to son for surviving the rite of passage to man hood; it still held the notch within it from his father’s battle with the—

Narologarth. Just the single word she sent him and it made every hair along the back his neck arise once more.

En’Kar felt his spine snap straight so fast that it cracked and popped like old bones rattling in graves.

“No,” hoarsely and aloud to her. He could not believe it. The twisted, man-made dragons? Those which turned on their creators thousands of years ago and had their majority sealed? Absolutely –“Impossible. Father killed the last nearly two decades ago and the city of Rylark reported not last week that the seal remained whole.”

I would not lie to you. It is the Narologarth, it is in my bones, in my heart. I can feel their taint ache my very wing-bones. They fly over the land as we speak and she weeps for their existence, their twisted, rotten bodies wither all in their path. They come. They will come before the second moon arises. From this distance, even I can hear them—there are many, En’Kar. Thousands. Thousands upon thousands. They will blot out the sun when it rises— and they are angry. Angry with what humanity has done and angry that the few of the true breeds left have sided with humans.

He felt the pieces fall together then in horrid irony—horrendously obvious, he drew the connection from his mother’s horrid choice of lullaby and the words of Ahsha in his mind as she spread out golden leathery wings in the cold and wrapped them slowly about his shoulders. Lowering the fire of her splendid, scale-covered snout, she ruffled his hair in comfort, huffing warm puffs of her breath across his skin.

Perhaps we can teach them that some sins can be forgiven? Perhaps we can show them that darkness and light resides in both of our kind?

“What if we can’t?” he asked. His words were quiet, filled with the foreboding dread and confusion. How can one night go from a dream to a nightmare in mere seconds? Ahsha’s ridges above her eyes lowered slightly, a very human expression of thoughtfulness. Her wings slid from him and she turned her head on long, sinuous, graceful neck to contemplate Nableen holding. For long moments she simply looked upon it as one would to fix something firmly in her memory.

Then we fight, as we should. As we always do. As it is our right and we will show them our strength. We will fight, for our freedom, our lives and our homes. We will fight for the things we love and keep them safe.

En’Kar felt her words place steel along his spine as he straightened further and he straightened. They were good words, hers, the right words. They always were.

“We will fight,” he agreed, and turned on his heel to face the arising of the second moon.