Starchildren ready for Rapture

Remember  back in this post when I compared Starseeds – aliens trapped in human bodies longing to return to the stars – with Christians – in the world but not of it and longing for the Kingdom of God? Well, over at the charmingly wacky site Rapture Ready one poster has written a short article using exactly this as the premise. Here’s a brief quote:

I am an Extra-Terrestrial. I am here, but I am not of this planet. There is no place on this earth that is my home; there are only fortifications that provide shelter from the raging storm.

I am here only by God’s will, His design, and His Grace. I did not choose this assignment — as I had no say in the matter — but I will carry out this assignment to the best of my ability and leave that to the leading of the Holy Spirit that indwells me. I take my orders from the command of the Most High, as I am a warrior and a peacemaker, a sinner and a saint.

Although I am an extra-terrestrial, I am in human form. I am of flesh, blood, and bone. While I am a warrior, an am not invincible and I can and do break. While I am a peacemaker, I stage a daily crusade of righteousness that has love as its foundation and yet thirsts for justice. Yes, I am a sinner — and I am the worst — but because I have accepted the gift of eternal life that Jesus so freely offered me I am a saint; despite my grievous flaws and chronic stumbling.

My, oh my, this human form is so limiting. I cannot fly just yet. I can’t go from here to there in a nano-second. I cannot do complex mathematical equations without the use of calculator! And yet, it’s these human senses that allow me to enjoy the sights, sounds, feelings, tastes, and aromas that are the benefits that this earth has to offer.

Ah, but these human emotions are the worst. These human emotions cause pain. And yet, I wouldn’t trade these emotions for the finest house anywhere on this earth. It is these emotions that make the entire human experience so enriching for an extra-terrestrial! They make me just like you…because I am like you!

Also worth checking out on the site is the Rapture Index, an attempt to predict the likelihood of Armageddon based on such indicators as False Messiahs, the Israel-Palestine peace process, American unemployment and Liberalism.

Homo Novis Caelestialis

The semester of uni for which I was doing Return of the Space Gods actually finished about 2 weeks ago; I got less blogging done than I’d intended, but it still added up to a fairly formidable word count for an art project.  In the end, there were three final pieces; this was my favourite, the culmination of the alien skulls series (Homo Noves Baratharii, Osiris, Tetropsis).  You can see some close-ups and working drawings below, but basically the work is a full size alien skeleton, four-eyed and pyramid-headed, drawn in 0.4mm technical pen.  It took forever to draw, but the final product is quite striking.

The other two final images were both oil paintings, Hyperrapture and Truth of the Space Gods. Because they were both very large, and not very dry when the semester ended, I had to put off photographing them.

Even though this is technically the end of Return of the Space Gods, I’ll keep this blog open and update it occasionally with stuff that interests me, and maybe even get round to writing those essays on CS Lewis’ Space trilogy, Olaf Stapledon and Solaris I’ve been planning.

Indiana Jones, the Crystal Skull, Angels and Demons and Cyrillic: A Random Drunk Post

It may look like I’m being very lazy not updating my blog, but nothing could be further from the truth. Behind the scenes I’m working away at my final “Space Gods” images, to the point where RSI from delicately tracing a life-size skeleton has almost crippled my hand.

Here is my mini-review for the new Indiana Jones film, in the form of free verse:

Crystal skulls, elongated heads,
how could this film not be fun?
Cate Blanchett’s pretty cool
she was in The Life Aquatic,
I’m indifferent to Shia LeBoeuf.
I work with a Ukrainian, she doesn’t sound

like that.
You can’t survive a nuclear explosion

in a fridge.
About 40 minutes in
I started to wond when it would end.

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I was thinking about Angels and Demons by Dan Brown yesterday, and that I liked it better than The Da Vinci Code. Okay, they were both pretty dumb, but Angels was a bit more up-front about it’s schlocky campness, whereas its sequel tried to be all clever with its references to feminism and Christian opression. The worst part was the way that Brown casually threw away the ethnic love interest in the first book (Vittoria Vetra) for an almost identical, equally undeveloped ethnic love interest in the second (Sophie Neuveu). You know what? I say he should have ditched his authorial stand in, Robert Langdon, with his invented expertise, and made Vittoria the heroine, and she and Sophie could have fought the Catholic Church and its wicked albinos together. A stunning Italian Lara Croft-type physicist/biologist/yoga master studying psychic powers in dolphins (or something) and he threw her away at the end of the book. All that fluff about the ‘Sacred Feminine’ was completely empty coming from an author who doesn’t believe in 3-dimensional female characters. Cut the bits about her Italian ancestors calling for vendetta and she’d have made Da Vinci twice as interesting.

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If you want to impress your Slavic friends, learn Cyrillic. You will also be able to sound out things written in Russian, Serbian and Ukranian, and even if you don’t know what it means, it will give you a feeling of accomplishment. This is the site I used to learn it, it’s incredibly simple, elegant and fun:

http://www.alphadictionary.com/rusgrammar/alphabet.html