28 November 2006

Wake Up and Nurture the Beauty

Reality is not presided over and pervaded by an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent being. It is time for our species to grow up and realise that our imaginary friends are externalisations of our own desires.

I am tired of legitimate causes and inspiring idols (fictional or not) being corrupted into religions, forgetting that their symbols are symbols: reminders, icons, manifestations that we created to represent ourselves or what we would like to be. I am tired of individual genius decaying into collective naïveté. Believing that these things are not of human creation is a kind of memetic vicario-schizophrenia.

31 October 2006

Roleplaying for Psychology

I have received some messages in the past from people who were under the impression that I believed roleplaying could better teach people about the world than direct experience. I have received more messages of this sort recently and have decided to make something very clear.

Nothing surpasses direct experience. Yet there are many experiences which cannot be achieved in reality. There are challenges, questions, and decisions to be faced only in roleplaying. Therefore I believe that people learn not about the world, but a great deal about themselves via roleplaying. Most importantly, they learn that they are more complex, more unique creatures than they had ever (regardless of anything) believed. This improves the person and thus improves people.

I do believe this. Our minds have evolved to a point that we can understand even those things which are not possible, and there is extreme personal merit in those things.

Even as an atheist I take this sentiment to heart:

'We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed, only by myth-making, only by becoming a "sub-creator" and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic "progress" leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of evil.' -- J.R.R. Tolkien

Because it has everything to do with every one of my passions unless I am distracted by the word 'God'.

25 October 2006

Chimaerician Contention

When musing the design of a world, I usually become stuck in an ideological struggle with myself between applicability and abstraction. The two are certainly not mutually exclusive, but interference does occur between them, and managing that is my greatest difficulty.

I enjoy abstraction because it can provide manifestation for thoughts. Abstract creations can embody an idea entirely inapplicable to reality yet nevertheless cognitively conceivable. Abstraction can also present applicable concepts in a way that encourages a certain perspective otherwise not easily attainable, if at all. In my mind, abstraction does not hinder applicability, but by opening new perspectives not necessarily pertaining to reality it can lead to unintended, unanticipated, and therein perhaps detrimental misinterpretation which may squander the intent of the work.

I am frustrated with this, tonight.

I have lately been designing a world I am currently calling Kimaera, from the Latin chimaera, which itself is from the Greek khimaira. I took a compromise. Anyway, Kimaera is, quite simply, my dreamworld. Not in that it is a world I would like to exist, but rather a world which has existed, for some reason, in my mind (while sleeping) for as long as I can remember. It is not particularly interesting in terms of storytelling possibility or visual intricacy; yet because it has been the realm in which all of my dreams have taken place seemingly since I was born, I figured that it may be worth exploring consciously.

A reality like this is naturally quite surreal, and I find myself asking why I am bothering to construct it. Like most of my creations, it is hardly the type of thing that one would sell. Stories and experiences are published, not the settings in which they take place. Kimaera is a new effort and I have hardly put the kind of work into it which I have poured into Aeramar, but this concern applies to both Kimaera and Aeramar, anyway.

11 October 2006

Air Taxes

The few truly open virtual worlds have shown that there is no reason it cannot be done in a thematic fashion as pioneered by the MMO industry. But they remain graphically primitive, mechanically unstable, and completely without theme by the very virtue of being open virtual worlds. They have the atmosphere of dreamscapes. Also because they obviously do not get the kind of funding that more... gamey projects receive.

This is why, for years now, I have been gaming only enough to learn about the game and then spew words into the Internet through the majority of my time, because I have seen how memes can develop this way and I know that one person with logical and passionate writing can equal five blubbering fools without true arguments to counter with. Developers know this enough to be pushing in that direction in areas they can during times that they can, but they also need to survive and their publishers are not going to take every chance all at once. Several including Brad McQuaid have made themselves clear as to where they would like this all to head, and grassroots projects are always rising that try to do too much at once.

This happens. It is a bad time for people who want the end result now. We clearly go mad.

We are still early in this era. It is much like watching a process of biological evolution. Pong being an amoeba and MUSHs being trilobytes.

I do find some small need for immersive, though primitive worlds that are not necessarily meaningful, because immersive experiences that are meaningful and not necessarily entertainment are still developing, still mutating from their origins, still bubbling beneath the surface, and the transition is agonising much of the time. Hence, again, why I watch and comment more than I take part.

I have also frequently considered abandoning all of this indefinitely, despite my second-to-one passion for it, to focus on my other cause.

I knew as long ago as the age of thirteen that so-called 'entertainment' does not increase my enjoyment of life. It increases my urge to churn the mess until it evolves. To provide my own direction. To get my hands into the 'gaming' industry and breed it my way, or to continue my acting career, or to take performing magic back up again, or to return to the nature of the little stand-up routines I was doing at Jester's here in Westfield. These are thing I know I could do, and they would improve my enjoyment of life, but not only would they not pay bills and buy food (in fact, most likely kill me), they would also not satisfy my insane compulsion to do what I think is noble in the long-term rather than short-term pleasantries. Writing books or opening a living foods establishment would do that, but also, most ironically, kill me with money.

Because you are charged to breathe air in this world.

Yet these are not new thoughts of mine, obviously. That does not mean that I will cease casting my spells.

31 May 2006

Occupation: Freelance Volunteer Lecturer

I like dark places, so I will not say that I have been in a dark place, recently, but I have been in a deadly place. I cannot spend another year like this, spitting in my own face, whoring myself to my horrors and struggling to remember my dreams.

Every dawn, as fatigue sets in, my eyes follow the woodgrain of my desk, the pixels on the display, and the twilight through the windows conceding to sunrise. This morning, my breathing catches the scent of a peach stone I discarded hours ago. The peach had been the size of a golf ball, dry, and underripe, with the consistency of something unconcerned with the consistency of peaches. My fifteen-year-old sister coughs with pneumonia somewhere on the floor below. Somehow, it is all not quite real anymore. Was it ever? I think this question as if it is a new thought. I tend to forget when I last asked myself. Was it last week?

The train passes. I envision myself writing something on the empty walls with blood. I wonder how well it would stain.

Ventrilo beeps. Erick has gone to sleep for the day.

I wish that food was as plentiful and affordable as technology.

Heh.

It is not that we have no money, but I have no money, and I refuse to be a parasite more than absolutely necessary to remain alive and sane. Even then, acquaintances will note, I tend to minimalise.

I accept gifts. With each dollar, I despise my situation more, but what can I do? I spend it on food. 5'7", 110 lbs. 100 lbs. 97 lbs. 93 lbs. 110 again. I try to savour the gift as much as the kindness of its giving. I am not taking this for granted. I know what I am doing. No one else seems to, but that does not matter, either, because knowing what I am doing only leads to more Catch-22s, more ironically dark humour.

This, and I still feel wasteful. Self-sabotaging. Philosophically raped. Psychologically solicitous. Academia's Whore, he called me....

A bird looks in from its perch on the window. I watch. It vanishes as a car pulls into the lot. I note that my vision is foggy. A part of my consciousness reminds me that it has been for months. I do my best to discard the thought.

I know everything that I need to do. Yet the trunk of that tree is to get out of here.

And I can't.

14 April 2006

For the Sake of Writing, Really

In tonight's world, healthily questioning humans, especially the Living Foods Movement, and most especially those embracing human frugivory to its core are, seemingly, in some states of mind, faced with a dilemma, because the tide has entirely reversed. The playing table is upside-down and backwards. Once upon a time, humanity would kill for a loaf of bread, a block of cheese, or a flagon of ale. Tonight, we are saturated with it. It is the norm to such an extent that it is what a human now envisions when 'food' is mentioned. The natural now seems exotic, rare, precious -- qualities previously associated with man-made meals. Bread-baking was once on par with being considered a miracle. Now, in many large areas of the world, it is a miracle if one is able to find an ounce of natural human sustenance. Where trees once stood stand livestock and the constructs of Nature's corpses in which we live and work. Where live fruit once fell fall polyethylene membranes filled with the waste of waste; cells twice-killed and in many cases unrecoverable unless a microbe evolves which can somehow assimilate and produce live cells from polymers.

The process of necromancy we are evoking upon the world is not inherently evil. Certainly, it is the destruction of a world with the apparent desire to replace it with another. Rejecting one reality and substituting our own. Creating our own 'nature' in which we are the gods. It is a bold ideal, and one which can go very well or very poorly.

Currently, it is going very poorly. The majority, seemingly including those in the highest positions of civilisation's power, are unaware of the magnitude of our actions, our power, the changes which we have been inflicting on this planet since our first-kindled fire. Those that are aware and, perhaps, may even see the potential of this power, are unable themselves to affect change in this power which would sway its creations and teachings in the direction of long-term survival and happiness rather than short-term satisfaction of desires brought on by the cellular death we are subjected to as consumers of death.

Io Lune recently wrote to me:
I have for some time seen good reason to question the Marxist model which states that the current state of affairs in the world is somehow nescesary in order to move on to something better. The only area, in fact, that I can see history as progressing from worse to better would in the sense of deterministic psychology and all of its various social effects. Ecologically and biochemically, many have really not gone in the right direction.

This is a facet of my contention, thus far.

So, what is the solution? How do we escape this grave we have dug for millennia? It would seem that a portion of the Living Foods Movement and related ideologies hold that, in many areas of science and societal memes, we must revert to the earliest relevant point and relearn with new intelligence and a (sometimes literally) fresh perspective. A physically ideal yet hotly contested suggestion. Of course, there exists the possibility that our current state of cognitive Limbo of acumen -- this Purgatory of consciousness which is hampering the individual on a level similar to, yet far varied from, the long-speculated unconsciousness of the Early Middle Ages -- is a stepping-stone to a level of human creation finally separated from death. The potentiality that intelligent synthesis can, with sufficient perception and understanding of cellular life, surpass the unconscious causality of Earth's Nature -- separately outdistancing it in nonalignment, neither subduing nor extinguishing it.

To an individual of endeavours such as the Living Foods Movement, either potential solution may seem, at first glance, to require beginning with the action of improving one's self. Yet with our state of great multiplicity, only aggregation holds the power to influence significantly beneath the governmental level, let alone to speak to it from below. Thus, perceptibly, the small actions embarking on amelioration must themselves stem from words. Roots, vines, and webs of words. Improvement in isolation, in this case, could only end in futility with the disesteem and eventually nigh-complete omission of such desire to heed the inner voice of reason which insists that the bulk of our current 'understanding' of ourselves and our surroundings is simply wrong.

On the other hand, we are talking about the species which has shown a history of supreme irony.