It’s too easy to be caught up in your life here in the U.S. and just forget about all the other countries out there that are in trouble- countries that are battling diseases, armies, freedom, liberty, peace- the world has so many problems!

Everyone is fighting for and against something, and you think that we would work to help solve things.

Soon, The Nearby Future will have a new page entitled either “Global Emergencies” or “Red Alert” or some combination of the two (I’m still deciding!) This new page will feature things you need to know and how you can help. It’s current, full of links, and a kind of a reference sheet, like our political election reference sheet.

So if you have any ideas for the new page, or just simply feel like adding your opinions, then leave a comment.

-Rika

You think that we (The Nearby Future Staff) have it easy: we research and write articles. Black and white, right? Wrong.

My daily to-do list/schedule looks something like this:

• 4:00 PM: click the spell check button on all submitted articles from the staff members who, apparently, are too good for spell check.
• 4:32 PM: hear Calister’s complaints about how the green flowers are too “girly”. Laugh along with him, promise that I’ll look into other templates, but secretly plan his demise.
• 4:46 PM: Check the site’s status and clap excitedly as I see that someone else BESIDES the staff actually commented!
• 4:56 PM: Reject Calister’s article on the stupid topics that have nothing to do with the future OR the environment OR technology. In the article rejection email, tell him that his next article should be about ice cream. Write a witty rejection letter in advance.
• 5:00 PM: Do some research on topics related to how corn should not be used as fuel, gripe about how hard it is to be an environmentalist to Calister. After all, it’s not like we can go around distributing pamphlets saying “Save the Trees” to promote our cause.
• 5:16 PM: Log off. Do real work. Try to not log back in. After all, I have other important things to do.
• 5:22 PM: Log in for a short time (only for a short time!) and read some more comments and edit more articles. Write an email to staff members explaining the value of spell check. Plan to send it as soon after I finish everything else I need to do. Log out, promise myself that I won’t log in again. (I won’t! I promise!)

So a lot of being a writer for The Nearby Future is watching the site, thinking up articles, doing research, debating with any living thing that talks, and typing it all up and delivering it to you.

Each writer has their own personality (Calister: Devious. Rika: Organized. Jala: Creative. etc etc..) and this is one of the ways our site is unique!

-Rika

Reminder: Vote in our April 2008 staff contest! Click the link to take the survey here and vote for YOUR favorite staff member! The survey is quick, it’s only four questions or so. We all read the submissions and analyze your comments, (and are very competitive when it comes to votes!) so please, stop by and vote!

Hi everybody! For one thing, I am the first (and maybe only) person to write an article stating why you should pick me for the April Staff Contest. As a newer member of the staff, I am now well-aware of everything now. Already, I have one vote and hopefully it will keep going! I write articles with purpose and things that you should worry about for the future.

Although I do think all the other staff members are great, I don’t think they are qualified enough. Here’s why you shouldn’t pick them:

Jala: She’s won every time…don’t you think you should give others a chance?

Kendra: She only does polls… does that tell you something?

Jennith: She doesn’t write that many articles…

Rika: I think you should pick her because she started the website and she manages everything

Piratical Lord of the Guitars: She is a great writer and she LOVES music! Almost all (or all) of her articles has to do with the future and music. I mean who doesn’t like music?!

Me (Hope): I write articles that have a very good purpose

Welcome to the first annual staff contest for thenearbyfuture.com !! In previous years on our freewebs.com/thenearbyfuture URL we’ve had staff contests, and Jala and Calister F. Wells were the victors.

So we put the power to award one of our hard working staff members the title of “Staff Contest Winner!”.

First, before you vote, here are all the staff members and a quote from them (taken from previous entries- not really relating to the staff contest):

Jala: “Three books. Three days. The story of my life.”

Hope: “I would also hate for a candidate to win if they really shouldn’t have.”

Calister F. Wells: “Words can’t win wars, and words can’t jump start a depressed economy, and even though words can help, they can’t do as much devastation as swords, and are certainly lacking against nuclear weapons.”

Rika: “A vote for Calister is a vote for a maniac who believes nuclear weapons are the answer. A vote for me is a vote for the trees!”

Piratical Lord of the Guitars: “As you can tell by the name I love Pirates of the Caribbean, Lord of the Rings, and of course the world’s most fabulous invention- the guitar!“

Jennith: ” What is this world coming to? First, we use corn for fuel. And now we’re using CHOCOLATE for fuel?”

Ashley Lampost: “The future contains many technological wonders that us mere mortals can hardly comprehend.”

Kendra: “Hello Moto!” (Don’t ask)

Voting:

To vote for your favorite staff member, leave a comment below OR take our survey! Taking our survey would help us out a lot more, but you can do either one. We suggest the quick, four question survey.

Take the survey by clicking on this link:Click Here to take survey

The staff contest ends on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008, so vote already!

Thanks for taking our survey! You have helped us a lot.

The human brain is very complex, and you see these new discoveries about it every day. Emotions and feelings, often times, are more complicated than anything else our body can do. Why do certain people feel certain ways? Why are women often times more organized? The list goes on…

No doubt we will know more secrets of the human brain as time progresses, but being able to figure out more information more quickly would speed up other discoveries as well.

An example of this is the latest in video games, slated to come out this winter: the Epoc. A game that uses the EEG brain signals to control a video game, this shows what we can do with technology and knowledge of the brain. The technology, as it turns out, is older and until now hasn’t been thought to be able to be so flexible. This is a perfect example of how new knowledge of the brain can turn old technology towards new uses!

The Epoc: (read about it here)

Now this all ties into our site. Kendra, our newest writer, wants to help discover the reasoning behind ideas, emotions, and thoughts in a simple way: by polls. So for the sake of science, take her polls! Every once in awhile I’ll come out with a new post summing up the results of her polls and what they mean. Maybe, if we can get enough participation, we can really get somewhere with our research!

(visit Kendra’s page HERE)

-Rika

So Rika has decided that in order to keep the “quality high” of our posts, we’re posting every OTHER day instead of EVERY day. (We don’t want to exhaust all our topics, do we?)

Expect the next post on the 15th and expect it to continue this way, our only regular post the philosophies on Mondays.

And Rika also wants me to pass on her thanks for all you people reading this, but I don’t see the point. What exactly did YOU do anyways that deserves thanks?

-Calister F. Wells

The Nearby Future staff has recently celebrated our 3-year mark; yes, we’ve been writing for three years. (Well, the original members, anyways) And this got me to thinking that I should not just write under the restraints of Rika’s editing, and, instead, should start my own blog. Of course I’d still write here, I’m not leaving this site anytime soon.

If you want to visit my new blog-in-the-making, just go to The Wells Mission; http://thewellsmission.blogspot.com/ (yes, I’m stuck in yet another server! Maybe, if our site grows enough, it will become “thewellsmission.com”)

So if you support Calister F. Wells, visit my site. If I get enough visitors, I’ll upgrade it to it’s own domain name.

-Calister F. Wells

Here’s some info on The Wells Mission:

Your mission, if you chose to accept it, is to save the human race from crazed environmentalists and politicians who don’t know what they’re doing, and to do it by way of knowledge and action. If you accept this challenge, go to The Wells Mission to receive more information and start your mission.

For your safety, this message will not self destruct.

Yes, like Nero, I change my name every now and then. I was formerly known as Jennith, but I just got way too bored of that name. So, now I’m Araena! And I’ve been here since this site wasn’t its own and was still attached to a freewebs URL. Here’s some info about me(I’ll try not to make it too boring):

I am HUGE on energy-efficiency. And I support the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals(ASPCA). Plus, I ride quarter horses and barrel race in competitions where I have placed 2nd. And, like Jala, a big portion of my life is spent on reading — and writing — books. My two favorite series are the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer and the Marked series by P.C. and Kristin Cast.

Well, I really don’t have much else to say. Yah. Well, have fun on this site!!

-Araena

My favorite day of the weeks is fridays THURSDAYS! Why? Well, on Sundays your whole day is ruined knowing that you have to go back to work on Monday. On Mondays the only thing you can think about is the looong week ahead of you. Tuesdays you still have the same mindset like Mondays. Wednesdays you act like some war hero that has survived through half of a war but still have another half to go. By the time that Thursday comes around, you’re mood has already increased noticeably because the weekend is finally in sight. On Friday the whole day is just shot because you’re counting down the hours until the weekend starts and you don’t get anything done. Saturdays are okay- but sometimes they’re busier than you would have ever wanted. Unfinished Christmas shopping, house cleaning, you name it- everything that you’ve been putting off smacks you upside the head on Saturdays.

So that was just a little bit of a week analysis in the life of Rika, (not to mention all the time I spend writing pointless articles like this one).

Now onto the important stuff: updates to come!

Here are the updates coming to the Nearby Future in the month of March:

• Election updates! We will update the election page weekly with poll information, standings, and stuff like that. We’ll probably even include some short clips of the candidate speeches.
• More media! We’re not just going to post text on here, we’ll be posting pictures and videos along with text!
• Presidential Debates: No, we’re not going to post videos of the presidents giving their lengthy speeches. Instead, Calister and I are going to give our own quirky opinions on the presidents and debate over them! This will be included on the election page.
• The Nearby Newsletter: All the convenience of our website packaged into a nice, neat little email that we send weekly to the people who subscribe. How does that sound? This is an idea in the works- no promises yet! Keep checking back for more on this.

So there you have it- some possible updates as they stand currently. Leave a comment about these ideas when you get the chance.

-Rika

We are changing the way we think. How?

• We are listening to America
• We are investing in ideas that you send us
• We are surfing Youtube
• And we are writing MORE LISTS!
• Lists about lists
• Lists listing lists
• Lists listing what we’re going to do for you, planet Earth
• Listing listed Youtube videos
• Abolishing the word ‘listed’ from being used any more in this blog entry.

In short, lists have been proven to have been read more than just your regular old text. Thanks to reading physiology reports and watching Youtube videos, we are bringing your more lists!

All thanks to this video,(scroll down) that helped change the way we think.

-Calister F. Wells (By the way, the video may take a moment to load)

Jala is our most popular staff member- and her new page (yes, she got a whole PAGE to herself…) just makes that even more true. What I want to know is WHY? WHY do you adoring fans vote for her as the staff contest winner? And not… let’s say…. me?

My assumption is that you people just like her because she loves books! (Not that THAT makes any sense) You people… I worry that she has you under some kind of spell that makes you grovel at her feet.

Well, I can’t fathom all of our reader’s thoughts- I just write the articles.

Now onto updates: The election page is going only so-so- it’s still in the draft. As distracted as I am, it probably will stay that way until the elections! With Spanish, sports… it’s amazing that I even get time to write something on here.

That’s it for updates! More updates coming soon, don’t forget. We plan to launch our “Bucket Brigade” page a little later on. Stay tuned!

-Rika

President Roosevelt, the president from the last depression.

17,000 jobs were lost in January 2008. The real estate market seems to be slipping under with people unable to sell their houses. With the beginnings of perhaps the first recession since 2001, people like me figure that a depression may be on it’s way- whether or not this is true all depends on the future president.

The Nearby Future will be watching the presidential candidates starting in March ’08, making predictions and gathering information. Don’t forget to check back as we continue to investigate on the subject of recession and depression, and also as we analyze the presidential candidates of 2008.

I’m just hoping that none will promise to abolish poverty. The LAST time someone did that was Herbert Hoover, and we all know what happened after him. The Great Depression made the poverty level increase dramatically- talk about ironic. And when Harding made that same promise back in the twenties, the Teapot Dome Scandal occurred. Not the biggest problem in history, (definitely not as bad as the Great Depression) but still leads me to believe that saying poverty will be gone is jinxed.

-Rika

People ask me sometimes why I write, why I work on this site religiously. There’s a simple answer; because I want to change the world.
I know I can’t do it on my own- this world is a large, often corrupted place. But raising awareness about global warming, getting people to come together and discuss ideas, THAT is what I’m here for. Someday this site will be a go-to for all those scientists who need concrete, rock solid information on how the world works. (Opinions included ) We are the type of people who live in this world- shouldn’t we know all about it?
Now I can’t completely change the world without my readers, of course! Just by writing a whole site doesn’t change anything except my own understanding. When you read it, you can make your next deciscion with confidence and ease; knowing you’re choice to, let’s say, buy a hybrid car that doesn’t run on corn, was the correct one.
If you are reading this, you’re already one step ahead. You’ve got an edge, an advantage, and you may not even realize it now.

I honestly want to change the world. And I need your help!

-Rika

*looks around happily* This site template is perfect! Now all we have to do is transfer over our old articles and then this URL will feel like home!

Sorry, it’s just after all the time we spent glued onto the end of freewebs (freewebs.com/thenearbyfuture) it’s nice that we have our own little space! Well, it’s not going to be little for long. We’ve jumped back and we’ve got twice as many good ideas as before!

Is this your first time visiting The Nearby Future? Are you a little lost? Go to the “About” page for a little info on us and our goals. I’m Rika, one of the site’s avid writers. We have a whole staff full of people that are devoted and out to blow our readers away!

We’re a helpful site here for the sole purpose of giving you information in a fun, opinion-filled way. We’re also here so that you can help change the world by way of presenting ideas for the world to perfect.

I’ll post daily- or, as often as I can, about news and other things, but mostly I’ll just be editing articles and moving them here.

Bring on the moving trucks! We’re here to stay.

-Rika