Still no mentionable creativity to report, I'm afraid. Surely the baby is still to blame, but still, it makes me feel uncomfortable from time to time. I feel I'm not living up to my own expectations. Then again, I realize on a more conscious level that I'm being too harsh on myself. A third child is a big change in one's life, especially if that child is born ten weeks early - with all the worry and stress that accompanies any birth.
Right now, the baby is relatively low-impact compared to our other kids, who were, quite frankly, terrible screamers... they both suffered from acid reflux - quite common, I know, but they had quite severe reflux problems.
Baby boy Nand does not have this problem - so far - but like all babies must, he puts in for a few hours of crying and general restlessness each day. Mostly in the late evenings, between nine and twelve PM. My creative hours, yes that's right.

So up to now, I have not touched my keyboard for anything other than some light surfing, Day Jobbery, and the occasional session of Sins of a Solar Empire. Cool game, that, by the way. A real space strategy game, in fact, many people think it's the first space strategy game that is really executed (almost) perfectly. It looks fabulous - zooming in and out between planets and star systems is a joy in itself - and the gameplay is very involved. All the favorite aspects of RTS games are present: resource gathering, technology development paths, building a fleet, pirate raiders, diplomacy, scouting, etc.
All in all, just the kind of game to idle away a few hours waiting for the baby's night feeding, and nothing too serious that suffers from frequent interruptions when he wakes up and needs to be picked up for a couple of minutes.

Anyway. I hope his sleeping pattern stabilizes just a little more, so I can get back to writing in earnest quickly.

Some general netleechery:

>>Kepler mission launched successfully.
The Kepler mission will go hunting for exoplanets - planets in other solar systems close (in astronomical terms) to our own.
Why care? Kepler's instruments should allow it to detect tiny planets - Earth-scale - and with the recent flood of exoplanet discoveries, the general expectation is that quite a number of these will be found. Who knows, there might be one or two with just the right combination of orbit distance (temperature), atmosphere, surface composition, to more or less match our own preferred environment. That would be cool, wouldn't it? All we would need would be transport...

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>> And talking about transport, there's been some debate following Charlie Stross' predictions about space colonization not being a realistic scenario, because of the many inhibitive factors (cost to lift sufficient mass outside of the earth's gravity well being the main one). Some people keep coming back to "Orion project"-style propulsion as the solution to all these problems.
Sorry, but I for one am not convinced the rapid detonation of nuclear bombs is the great way forward. Rocket launches - even using conventional technology that has been around for over sixty years - go wrong at an astonishing rate. Is it two out of every ten launches that fail? I'm not sure I got that statistic right, but anyway, rockets keep malfunctioning under the extreme conditions that arise when you shoot something out of the atmosphere. And call me a coward, but I'd rather not see a vehicle carrying enough fuel for millions of nuclear explosions blow up in the night sky.

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>> Why do Killer Asteriods Fascinate Us So?
To continue on the spacey theme, Discover Magazine (via Jay Lake's link salad) has a story on why asteroids fascinate our collective conscience. I know it is something that worries even my four-and-a-half year old son; it's been something he keeps asking from time ever since learning about the asteroid impact as a possible extinction event for the dinosaurs. From that perspective, I don't think it has anything to do with cultural predilections, but everything with an innate fear of the unpredictable, the unpreventable, "divine intervention"-style events that no one can do anything about.
And who can blame us?