I’ve had a couple of good meetings over the past week or so around this game concept I’ve been developing.  Promising meetings all around.  I’ve also gotten just the teeniest bit of play from a literary agent who thinks the supporting work I’ve been working on has some potential, or might if I can fix some of my more common characterization problems.  I feel like I have the puzzle pieces that I need in hand right now, I just have to figure out how to shift them to match without dropping something.   If I can slot them together just right I think I’ll have something memorable.

Maybe I’ve just been out of the oceanographic scene for too long, but I’m noticing more and more jellyfish displays at the aquariums I frequent.  Now, I love the jellies, and I have a thing for 2ft thick plexiglass keeping thousands of gallon of water at bay simply so I can observe life under water.  But it makes me wonder about the inconsideration of these little lives.  There are a host of critters people feel “bad” about keeping caged up, usually they’re cute at least at some stage of their lives, and certainly they are capable of some higher brain function.  But the invertebrates, the fish, noone seems to mind keeping them under glass.  They are disposable lives, like ants, or termites.  I’ve had the privelige of going behind the scenes at Steinhardt, I know how hard they try to keep all their fish healthy, happy, keep the attrition (which, as anyone who has ever got goldfish from the county-fair knows can be sky high) to an absolute minimum.  I suspect, in fact, that it’s much more difficult keeping a tankful of rare Sountern Nesbit Gillywhackers alive than it is to keep seals, or dolphins.  At least know can tell when the seals are ill.  Fish go fast, one minute they’re swimming, the next they’re floating.  They are cryptic at best when it comes to illness, downright contrary at worst.  So I often feel that they are kept as the filler, you can keep as many as your tanks will support and the showcase critter is usually something more controversial, like a whale, or a sea-lion, penguins perhaps.  Thing is, these “disposable lives” are often so much more fascinating.  They are brightly colored, evolutionarily spectactular critters.  Fish with fins like leaves, or tentacles that sting, critters so poisonous you could probably die just by looking at them if the plexi wasn’t so thick.  Stonefish and Moorish Idols and rare Chinese Giant Salamanders.  There’s so many of them and they are all so distinct that it’s almost like the plain, the grey and beige of the showpiece animals have become exotic by comparison.