Monthly Archives: May 2009

Real life! Really!

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di090510

The end of spring, the coming of summer.

Well, it is real to me, but you are already one step removed, having only a photography and my word for it.  And some of my games already have so realistic graphics that the casual observer may be fooled.  But for one who is there, real life is still a cut above the rest, to say the least.

Games can give a reasonably lifelike picture of the landscape, but I have so far to see any that has real depth. And even when they one day get the sight and sound right, I will still not be able to feel the spring-chilled wind ruffle my hair and smell earth and flowering trees. (The smell of “natural fertilizer” is luckily gone for this time.)  And I rather prefer tired legs after a long trip over the wrist pain after a long gaming session.  So, all in all, real life still has its advantages.  I would definitely miss it.

Short health update

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I refer you to my entry from Thursday, in which I had sudden and inexplicable stomach pain.  Today I have “stomach pain” too, but it feels completely different.  Actually it feels more like muscle pain tham for instance gut pain, while the pain on Thursday felt a lot like gut pain, only much higher up and hitting a larger area at once (especially in the beginning).

I had a more local pain above the navel yesterday, but that too felt more like muscle pain even though it was in the exact spot where I use to feel stomach pain from too much acid.  I thought it was perhaps because my doctor prodded me there the night before.  (Then again I also had a bad flare of haemorrhoids, and he did not prod me there. So who knows.)

Today the area that hurts is much larger, and feels sore as if I got punched in my lower stomach. Which actually to some small degree happened today when I was handmowing the lawn. I suddenly ran into a small hole in the lawn and ran into the handle of the mower, but not at high speed luckily.  Those things can be dangerous!  But when they don’t kill you, they make you stronger. At my age, that is a pretty compelling excuse. Or so I thought.

Anyway, I don’t have fever and the pain is like most of them, an inconvenience only.  So unlike something new happens, I will mostly ignore it.  It is soon bedtime anyway. I slept for like 9 hours last night, but that was only barely enough to pay off the sleep debt from Thursday when I spent much of the night visiting the ER instead of my bed.

Sitting down, shutting up

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di090508

I need to calm myself down!  If you sometimes feel like that, you may want to read this. If not, you may NEED to read it…

I was thinking to write about the two brainwave entrainment systems I have tested this spring, Holosync and LifeFlow.  However, I realized that this should come first.

As I said already when I was reading up on Holosync, before buying the first (and for me, last) module: Personal growth and transformation will come in some form to virtually anyone who sets aside an hour a day for a monotonous task with a noble purpose. Or to put it more bluntly:  Sit down and shut up, and you will become a better person.

I do not know if it has always been like this. Probably, for in ages past, the day often went with simply working and caring for the most immediate needs. Only a few had the leisure to choose between wisdom and debauchery. But today, the whip we crack to keep us running is inside us rather than outside. The ever running, hectic mind will not be quiet. We work only half as much as our ancestors, and still we have barely time to sleep.

If you have been running around like that, not able to sit still for more than five minutes at best, doing “nothing” for an hour (or even a half!) can be a harrowing experience.  Bill Harris of Centerpointe and Michael Mackensie of Project Meditation both speak of “resistance” as being common, and even “upheaval” being possible, and they give much similar advice on how to deal with it.  Many of these things will happen even if you just sit there, say I.  Memories you had forgotten return out of the blue. Feelings you cannot explain suddenly arise, whether happy or sad.  You become aware of many bodily sensations that you did not notice before.  You suddenly think of a lot of things you should have done. You suddenly miss an old friend or relative that you could phone, or you realize that the house badly needs cleaning.

(Actually, unlike some respectable sages, I think the cleaning urge can be a good sign.  Sitting exercise increase the order within you, so the disorder around you become more obvious and contrary to you. I have good experience with doing some modest amount of cleaning and then returning to my position. But it is also possible that it can serve merely as a distraction, if the need is not real.)

More obvious hindrances are the intense feeling of boredom and urge to be entertained.  Normally people who have nothing else to do will sit down with the TV.  Failing that, a computer will do. It has endless entertainment and distraction.  (I feel the urge to open City of Heroes even now – I guess Goodwin is right that blogging can also be a form of spiritual exercise, “blogio divina” I think he calls it, although Google seems to not recognize that phrase.)

Failing any of these outlet, the human mind will throw itself into remembering (and often rewriting) the past, planning for the future, and constructing elaborate daydreams.  This is what I have written about so often lately, the “default network” of the brain.  (Google will offer to drown you in information about this if you don’t remember my earlier rants.) Everything to make sure we are not actually present in the moment.

Holosync, Hemisync, LifeFlow and many others may have other virtues as well, but arguably their main effect is that they keep people from escaping (or fleeing in horror) from the very act of quietude. Meditation and prayer do this as well, in addition to their own specific effects. Even listening to classic music (I recommend Back on principle) or watching art could have some effect.  And of course watching paint dry.

Before you go into any act of quietude with the sincere intention to make it part of your life, you should be prepared that resistance will appear.  The effect of quietude is growing awareness.  At first this awareness will be dispersed and unfocused, and therefore you will see these effects:  Random memories, feelings, impulses, small pains or itches or strange sensations of your body.  They are the first encounters of your awareness!  The awareness needs to be collected, tamed and trained to go beyond these distractions if you want to grow as a person.  You will meet things you have failed to integrate in the past, or as in my nightmare, thrown down in the basement and locked the door. You will even meet the collective delusions of our culture, and must go beyond these to begin to wake up.

But the first step is to stop stepping, sit down and shut up for a while.

Intense stomach pain

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Intense stomach pain for about an hour now. Weak, sweating. Normally I am quite resistant to pain, but this is something new.  Called taxi to emergency room.  Probably overkill. If so, you will hear from me again.

3 hours later:

Another black star in my hypochondria book, no doubt. I have really tried to avoid going to doctors to let my reputation cool off, but I’ve never felt this kind of stomach pain in my life. So I called the emergency room and they said to stop by. I took a taxi to the other side of the city where they are, near the hospital. And of course, the pain faded during the taxi trip, and while I waited at the emergency room, it disappeared entirely. (I did “finally” become queasy though, but still haven’t thrown up.) The doctor kneaded my stomach and surrounding areas but found nothing. This happens as regularly as clockwork: No matter how acutely ill I am, when I meet the doctor I am in perfect health, better than most healthy people. There must be something about the aura of those places that supernaturally buoys my health while there, or something. I KNEW this would happen, but it does not happen while I stay at home. I have to actually go destroy my credibility to get healed.

The doctor wrote a letter to my regular doctor. He did not have an explanation for the pain at all, but wanted me to get checked for “cholelithiasis” and for some discoloration of my skin that cannot possibly have anything to do with stomach pains. On the bright side, I walked briskly for half an hour from the hospital to the city, something I feel pretty sure I would not have done with a ruptured stomach. Or indeed any medical condition worth its Latin name. So apart from wasting a measly $250 or so, and further making sure nobody will take me seriously when I finally come down with Death, it was worth the trip.

CDs that leave my home

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di090506

Music is difficult to let go of. Especially when cute girls are involved, I guess, and surprisingly often they are.

I have come to the CDs that resist being thrown in the garbage. Even though the song being ripped right now is actually called “Trash”. It is by Suede, from the album “Coming Up”. I have not played it for some time – a couple years, surely. And even when I did, I only played two of the tracks. One was “Trash”, the other was (even more appropriately) “Lazy”. There is a story behind that, of course.

I bought this CD (like so many others) after listening to these tracks repeatedly at the home of my best friend over many years, the amazing Superwoman. (I wrote about remembering this already in 2001. Complete with embarrassing daydream about her. Well, more like embarrassingly safe for work.) Whenever I heard them later, a part of me remembered those times, which were good times indeed. Not that times are bad now. They are good in a different way though. One of the differences is that I can’t sit down with my online friends and listen to music together. At least not yet. I am mildly surprised that this is not yet possible. Perhaps it is, but I just don’t know about it?

In any case, over several years most of my new CDs came from listening to music together with her. She had great taste in music, although she was more omnivorous than I. It took me quite a while to find some music on my own after we parted ways completely. And most of what I’ve bought after that has been Japanese pop that I learned from watching anime.  Eventually I also found some songs via Last.FM, but those are mostly bought via iTunes so I don’t need to rip them and throw away the CDs… Someone did that already.

The previous CD that I ripped today was “luring” by Odd Nordstoga. If you think Odd is an odd name, you are probably not Norwegian. He is one of the few remaining artists that create and sing songs in my native language, Nynorsk (New Norwegian). If you think it looks more like New Norse, that is not far off either. It was created during the time when Norway was awakening to national independence, and its purpose was to gather the heritage from old Norse that had been preserved in our dialects during the centuries of Danish and later Swedish rule. But the pressure from the Danish-Norwegian BokmÃ¥l (Book Language) favored in the cities has gradually polluted the ur-Norwegian language, so that today only a few of us can write it fluently without unwittingly bastardizing it with Danicisms. Among those few are I and Odd Nordstoga. And possibly my friend Zimena (her name changes from time to time, as she has a lot more to protect than I, and anyway her journal is friends-only for a while now). She is a much greater fan of Nordstoga than am I. Truth be told, the only track I played more than once on that CD was the first one, the national smash hit “Kveldssong for deg og meg”. Ooh, I wrote about it in 2004.

The first of the tree CDs I throw out today is “Dreamland” by Robert Miles. Again this was one I learned about from my best friend, but while she was taken by the song “Children” (if I remember correctly), having seen a music video of it, I preferred the song “One & One”. Ooh, I wrote about it in 2001. Seems I did remember correctly after all those years. Woo, go me! And I already wrote about it in 1999, one of my entries most worth reading actually, once it finds it was a bit down the page. “Let’s stand still in time” – that was indeed in some ways the high point of my life. A part of me wants to go back and live that year again – and again, and again. Yes wouldn’t that be nice… if I could do it without losing what I have gained since. But I can’t. But at least I don’t need to lose the song, even if I throw away the CD.

CoH: My first story (continued)

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So I continued to work on my first Mission Architect story in City of Heroes. I ended up using a scrapper for my third mission instead of the mastermind.  I still consider adding a mastermind later, and possibly a controller. For now, the story is published with these three missions:

-Assist the tanker, levels 1-14

-Assist the defender, levels 20-29(?)

-Assist the scrapper, levels 25-34.

Apart from freeing the heroes, you help them complete their missions, which vary slightly but contain at least one boss (but no elite bosses or archvillains). If one or more of the missions is outside your current level, you will be set to the nearest possible level.  You will not get new powers if you play at a higher level, but your current powers will work at that level.  (This is always the case with Architect missions, not just mine.)

I tested it after publishing, with my level 8 mastermind.  I made him spesifically to level up on Architect content, since I hate the evil missions in City of Villains. But I have not played much lately, so he is still a lowbie.  He did gain a level from testing this story arc a couple times though.  (I did some pure testing before I published it, which gives badges but not experience points, influence or tickets.) After it was published, it gave all those things, but not a whole lot since it is not very difficult.  In addition to giving villains a wholesome classic heroic story, I also wanted it to be useful for newbies who are still not very good with the game, and for archetypes and power combinations that start out weak and may have problems soloing a normal mission. (I remember having that problem when I was new myself, and made a promise to myself to help others when I got the chance.)

I consider making another story arc that is even more designed to help weak characters, but this is it for now.

CoH Architect: Making my first story

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2009-05-04 22:16:30

Me and Otaku Offense, screenshot from testing my first Mission Architect story.

Today I made my first story arch in City of Heroes.  As recently as before Easter, only the developers from NCSoft could make stories for the game.  Now even I can do it, and trust me, this is not the kind of creativity I have a natural talent for. I really feel like a newbie at this, and fellow players would probably notice that newbieness if they played the story I have made.  Then again, give me one more day to finish it and it will look pretty good.

The tools are amazingly easy to use.  I did miss out on some details because I did not scroll far enough down, but  the program reminded me if it was important, and took me to the place where there was missing information.  Creating new enemies and allies is as easy as making a new character in the game proper, which is famously easy and fun and a main attraction of the game.  (Probably also a main reason why a large number of the players are women in real life, or at least on LiveJournal.)

It is also possible to build some randomness into the story arc, such as a randomly chosen abandoned warehouse among several different possible, or a randomly chosen boss to fight among several possible. On the other hand, you can put in a lot of detail such as things the allies and enemies say.

I made a story arc in which you are sent to help (computer controlled) heroes who got captured while doing a normal hero mission, fighting a house full of villains.  They are held capture inside the house, and once you have freed them, they will assist you with clearing out the baddies.  (Story-wise it is actually their mission and you are assisting them.) I made this story for people who have not made their heroes good at playing alone, but who for some reason may have problems getting a team.  Or for newbies who suck but will improve with time.

The first mission is to help a tanker (heroes who can take a lot of damage without getting defeated).  The creatively named Tankman Man has a bright red, white and blue uniform and a vacant grin on his face, but he can take almost unlimited amounts of attacks without buckling.  He is also excessively agrressive, running ahead and attacking anything in sight.  After the mission is over, he takes all the credit (but you still get your tickets so who cares). The mission is very low level, but this does not really matter much since you automatically get translated to the correct level.

The second mission is to help a kinetic defender, Otaku Offender. She is dressed like a Japanese schoolgirl (see picture) and has an impressive array of powers to power up her teammates.  (Or teammate, if you play alone.) She also has a few attacks, but will not hare off on her own, staying near you and assisting you instead. This mission is in the level 20-30 range, or around the middle of the career.  (50 is the highest level.)

I plan to have a third mission, on an even higher level, featuring a mastermind (villain archetype) doing a heroic mission.  But perhaps I will publish it with just the two missions first and see how it works in terms of rewards before I complete it.

Or perhaps I suddenly think of something else I would rather do, and wander off.

City of Heroes Architect tickets

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So this day I found out something new.  I haven’t held the Architect missions (user-made) in high regard because you only get tickets, not recipes and salvage and enhancements.  But then I got the message that I could not get more tickets because my inventory was full.  It turned out I had 9999 tickets after a couple levels.  I went to the ticket person elsewhere in the AE building, and it turned out I could use it to buy… recipe, salvage and enhancement.  Actually I got a lot of stuff, more than I could have gotten the usual way. That may be because I had been on farming teams for a couple levels though.  I thought they only farmed experience and influence points, but evidently they make lots of tickets too. I never noticed.

City of Heroes night

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2009-05-02 20:23:34

Serenity in City of Heroes.  Crimson Star Fighter enjoys the beautiful wilderness landscape.  (Never mind the group of shambling zombies at the foot of the hill behind him, and the Nazi werewolves you can’t see in front of him.)

Yesterday and today I played City of Heroes for some hours.  This game is the hobby that has suffered the most from my adventures into brainwave entrainment this spring.  Sims 2 has continued much like before, except that I have switched to a Sim neighborhood that requires less attention.  CoH, however, has gotten very little me time, despite the awesome new free expansion I wrote about.

Perhaps the real reason is different:  The peaceful everyday life of my Sims goes better with the serenity of meditation than the excitement, danger and violence simulated by the superhero game. As I grow older, it is natural to wonder why setting bullies on fire remains one of my greatest joys.

In any case, I have spent some hours in CoH again.  My return to the game was partly caused by reading that the prices of invention salvage were ridiculously high.  People have been leveling so quickly in the new Architect missions, they were desperate to get enhancements suitable for their higher level.  I rushed to meet the increased demand with my supply, but the prices soon started to drop. Clearly others have thought the same way. I also saw (and was invited to) several teams doing classic missions (not user-made), so the death of the classic content is clearly exaggerated.

This is not to say that  AE (the Architect building) is not packed, especially in the most populated servers, especially in the evening and night American time, and especially in Atlas Park (the most popular newbie zone).  A good number of the people there are probably new players drawn in by the new feature, or people who have been away from the game for a while.  The broadcast channel is full of people looking for AE teams at those times and places, mostly farm teams but some specifically non-farm.  By farming we don’t mean raising livestock and pulling weeds, but rather doing missions repeatedly for profit (experience points, influence and tickets) rather than for their story content.  This is a long-standing practice in all massive online roleplaying games, but has become even more profitable with some of the user-made missions.

One nice little feature of the new AE mission system was one I discovered by accident when my game crashed. (I was lazy and tried to play with Vista.  Needless to say I rebooted to Linux after the first and only crash of the night.) I was feeling pretty bad about the crash because I had failed to memorize or write down the name of my team leader so I could call him in-game when I reconnected.  But to my delight, I came back into the game and was still a member of the team!  This also happens in task forces, long rows of missions that are performed by a fixed team that may sometimes stay together for days, logging off and meeting again.  But in task forces, you cannot invite new members once the chain of missions has started.  In Architect missions you can.  (Incidentally, this also makes it easier to kick parasites off the team, since you can replace them easily with more motivated players. I saw this in practice as well, although I was not the target of that.)

Origin of government

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di090501

We don’t want Earth’s civilization to go the wrong way, but which way is that, and which is right?

In these days when people all over the developed world (and then some) look to their governments to fix the economy, provide “free” health care and generally kiss the pain away and make it all better, it may be useful to take a look at how government as a concept began: The mafia gaining a monopoly on violence.

Anarchy works just fine for a small village of interrelated families. But if population grows beyond a certain point, or regular contact is established with other villages, organized crime appears. Groups of violent men find that they can easily take what they want by threats of violence. Since most people are neither violent nor organized, much less both, this works very well for those who are.

But as the population (or communication) increases, rival gangs appear, typically with separate core districts where their control is absolute, and turf wars where their ambitions overlap. At this point, the local gangsters can take your stuff in exchange for promises to protect you from rival gangs, as opposed to taking your stuff in exchange for not beating you to a bloody pulp themselves. This is a big step upward in relations.  This so-called “protection money” is the precursor of today’s taxes.

As civilization advances, the emerging warrior class lives more symbiotically with the populace, their role as protectors becoming more prominent as large-scale war is a permanent threat and a standing army becomes necessary to avoid plunder by barbarians (this includes rival civilizations, who behave like barbarians while away from home.  You can still see this trait in Norwegian tourists abroad, but let’s not go there today.)

The “families” of the mafia-style criminal hierarchy develop into the kings and nobles of the feudal era, now ruling by divine right as the axial religions worhips order as a divine attribute. The legitimate rulers and their faithful warriors now protect the peaceful citizens from brigands, bandits and gangsters – the small upstarts who were the root of their own origin in a now forgotten age. And of course, the army protects us against other armies. Eventually a separate police force maintains the internal peace, but the police and the army are part of the same government, which has a monopoly on violence.

Finally we got the power to elect our own rulers, within certain limits. At this point, when they seem to be working for us rather than the other way around, all kinds of expectations arise, as if the government was a benevolent parent rather than a mafia demanding protection money. It is still glaringly obvious in some countries that the true power is in the guns: See Turkey, Pakistan and Thailand, democratic countries where the army still steps in regularly if they don’t like what the elected folks do.  But that could never happen here, right? Because we love our government and our government loves us.

It seems likely (as psychohistory implies) that the progress in government does in fact reflect the progress in parenting. It may seem obvious to us that parents have at all times and all places loved their children, but this is only true for pretty badly screwed up values of “love”, values that are then inherited by the next generation and only gradually soften over millennia of cultivation of higher values.

A society where trust is possible at all, much less trust in the government, is indeed a monumental achievement. Even so, if you have taken a long hard look at history, I think you will feel a bit nervous about waiting for government to solve our problems.