Coded gray.

Wednesday 4 September 2002

Screenshot DAoC

Pic of the day: Actually this picture is not from the west coast of Norway, but from Midgard (in the game Dark Age of Camelot). Not that you would notice the difference.

Keiko and EverCrack

There is a killer whale on the west coast of Norway. It is not killing people, I am happy to say. Quite the opposite: people may be killing it, without even knowing. The small whale is a former movie star from the movie "Free Willy". Naturally after the movie someone belatedly considered that perhaps the whale star of the movie should also be free. So they returned him to the ocean and spent a couple million dollars of training him to live in the wild again.

After a couple months the poor thing arrived at the coast of Norway, and discovered people. The natives were delighted by the friendly animal; they played with him and gave him fish. Then the news reached the trained professionals responsible for getting Keiko back in the wild. They arrived and media arrived and there was a lot of cackling. Some think the poor critter should be shot before he starves to death, others will spend more money to get him back to the wild life of his ancestors, and all agree that people should stay away.

Nobody asks Keiko. I can't help but think of the short story "Barnaby in exile", by Mike Resnick I believe. In it a particularly smart bonobo ("pygmy chimp") grows up in a lab and learns sign language, but then the funding runs out and he is dumped at the edge of the jungle. We follow the poor critter as he wonders what is going on, and a loneliness that exceeds human imagination.

***

Killer whales, like dolphins, are extremely social creatures, more so than humans even. For some reason, they are able to substitute human company for their own race. This is quite puzzling. Unlike apes, they cannot recognize humans as similar to them in form. And they are carnivores. They eat fish, which look more like them than we do. They even eat whales, which Norwegians and Japanese are not supposed to eat. But they don't eat Norwegians. They have hunted in packs with Norwegian whalers since the age of sails, perhaps in a similar event to how the wild ancestor of the dog joined up with our race tens of thousands of years ago. Perhaps intelligent life forms are able to recognize each other despite outward differences. (Of course, it took a bit longer for humans to recognize the cetaceans.)

Scientists fear that the poor creature may starve to death because he prefers to play with humans instead of hunting. Well, he'll be in good company. I read on the Net that players of the online RPG "EverQuest" suffer similar fates. While they may not actually starve to death, they do lose their jobs and their families. And since they are human, we do feed them instead of shooting them (but we don't spend millions on each of them either). Among former EQ players and former spouses of EQ players the game is referred to as "EverCrack", a word play on an addictive drug. (I can think of at least one other crack that would be relevant too, but then again I bought the game and never even got it to run, despite buying a brand new machine expressly ordered for that purpose. Enough about me.)

Basically, the need to play with other sentient beings is so strong in some that they cannot make themselves stop even for their own health. I guess there is a point to all this, but I am not sure what. Now if you will excuse me, I need to get back to playing Dark Age of Camelot...


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One year ago: Family affairs
Two years ago: Man without a woman
Three years ago: Soup hunting

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