I can't keep beginning every entry with the words "this week's picture", so each week I have to think up some pointless comment to begin with before I inevitably refer to "this week's picture." So I'm not going to say that at all. We'll just assume there's a picture I'm talking about unless I make the special disclaimer at the very beginning; "I have no picture to share."
More robots, I know. These are actually my vision of metallic life forms that will someday proliferate through the solar system if I have any say in the matter. They live on tiny worlds that have minimal gravity. They stick on the worlds through electromagnetism. The robots are little orbs, but they can upgrade by purchasing arms and tractor legs and additional spherical body sections. Actually I've created a video game, essentially. Orb-land. Or Orb-ball. Those names won't work. There's no land in the game except on the big orbs, so Orb-land makes no sense. And Orb-ball is redundant.
I'll have to have the hagenart marketing department research whether this idea has been done yet. Orbiverse. SubOrban. Yes!
I'll keep thinking, but marketing will want to do the name. My job is the product, and I'm practically finished with design right now. I've really got the Orb rotating! And I have the feeling that the delightfully synonymic relationship of orb and ball and world will provide me with an almost endless river of jokes - a whole new Orb of them! - with which to delight the reader and myself.
Of course marketing will try their best to find that someone else has already done it, just as development will try our best to replace 'ball' with 'orb' in as many amusing ways as we can before passing the orb to production, leaving them with whatever scraps didn't pass muster in the initial humor mining.
Back to the picture, which the more I think of it pretty neatly encapsulates the spirit and idea and metastructure of the game so well that production will have a remarkably easy time extracting some fantastic gameplay out of, it's just basically fill in the blanks with simple Java or ruby rails or whatever the coding drones call it. Basically I think we've got it, once marketing sells the idea for enough to hire a production department, and of course pay their own wages as well. And of course those wages might encourage them to evaluate the ideas rotating out of development (psych!) with maybe a touch more effort than it takes to do a couple of Google searches. But I admit that marketing is outside my orb of expertise, so I don't want to tell them how to do their job. Yes! I'm really on an orbit today!
On a more serious note, I attempted to depict the orientation of robot figures in this picture as rotating from directly under the POV at the bottom of the picture to 90 degrees up at the top of the picture, so as to demonstrate the spherical nature of the surface they're on. I failed in this, just as I failed to find a synonym of spherical that uses the root 'orb''. Have I already used up the 'orb' mine? Already feeling the let-down that usually waits until after the marketing report. Between the orb and the reality falls the shadow
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