marylowd – Page 101 – Deep Sky Anchor

Flerble Gerbil was a Hologram

by Mary E. Lowd

A Deep Sky Anchor Original, November 2022

“I don’t want to hurt anyone, even gerbils,” the metal grasshopper said in a high-pitched voice. “Are you going to hurt me?”

A tiny metal object jumped through Lea’s open window, drawing her attention away from the Animorphs book she’d been reading. She put down the borrowed e-reader from her mom on the bed and went over to investigate.

Lea hadn’t seen the object very well — it had been moving too fast. Just a blur really. But it had reflected the sunlight, shining like a quarter thrown into a fountain, outshining all the pennies around it. So, she wondered if it might be valuable. Continue reading “Flerble Gerbil was a Hologram”

Feral vs. Indoor Only

It used to be that if I didn’t practice getting out and interacting with people, I would go kind of feral…

After several years of pandemic, sticking to my small bubble, it feels less like going feral and more like I’ve just become a permanent indoor kitty.

Experimenting with AI Writing

Out of curiosity, I made an account with a text generating AI program, and I’ve been wrestling with it to see if it’s useful or fun…

So far, it’s at least as hard as normal writing, possibly harder.

I wanted to start off with a project I’m invested in enough to bother with… but not so much that I’ll mind outside interference.

Then I remembered I had a first sentence stored away for a furry re-imaging of The Matrix and figured writing about AI with an AI could be fun… Continue reading “Experimenting with AI Writing”

Sneakers Music

The music at the open air plaza where I go to write sometimes is especially jazzy today and has a repeated riff that strongly evokes the music in Sneakers to me. It makes me feel like instead of writing a novel, I must be doing some sort of top secret codebreaking hacking.

Monster Mash Variant

My spouse, a professor: “I came up with an academic parody of Monster Mash!”

Spouse, singing: “I was working in the lab late one night…” Continue reading “Monster Mash Variant”

Early Halloween

Halloween accomplished! We took the kids trick-or-treating downtown, watched The Sixth Sense, ate pumpkin spice pancakes for dinner, carved jack-o-lanterns, and walked through a haunted farm event.

And yet, somehow there’s still a full day before it’s Halloween…

The Sixth Sense

I’d only ever seen “The Sixth Sense” once before, easily over twenty years ago, and my brain had condensed it down in my memory to basically just the twist at the end… but wow, that is a masterful movie all the way through. Just incredibly well done on every level.

Jetpack and Cyborg Wings

by Mary E. Lowd

Originally published in Daily Science Fiction, October 2018

“Neither of them wore spacesuits — their exoskeletons protected most of their bodies, and a thin coating of amphiphilic goo around their joints sealed the gaps up well enough for an hour long joy-jaunt around the station’s exterior.”

Lee-a-lei and her clone-daughter Am-lei perched in the Crossroads Station recreational airlock with their long spindly legs folded. The two lepidopterans exchanged a glance with glittering, multi-faceted eyes. Lee-a-lei was nervous and kept flapping her mechanical wings, but her daughter looked excited.

Am-lei didn’t have wings. She’d followed the traditions of their homeworld and had her yellow-blue-and-purple wings cut off after she metamorphosed. So, she wore a simple zero-gee jetpack like a human or one of the canine Heffens would. The jetpack strapped around her thorax, firmly secured. Lee-a-lei had checked her daughter’s straps several times. Continue reading “Jetpack and Cyborg Wings”

Jellyfish Videos

Hanging out with my kid, both working… and slowly realizing, “Wait a minute, that’s not biology homework, that’s just jellyfish videos you’re watching for fun!”

I’m all for the kid learning about jellyfish for fun, but it’s also good when they do actual schoolwork too.

Druid Favoritism

It is truly nonsense the sheer number of things that druids are allowed to do while in flight form that other classes cannot do while mounted (in World of Warcraft). It makes the classes wildly unbalanced, steeply skewed in favor of druids.