Monthly Archives: November 2011

Neo-Tamriel worldbuilding

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Pinching from behind in Daggerfall

Little known fact: In the RPG Daggerfall, you got rewarded for sneaking up on people from behind. In this case the reward is minimal, but then again it’s not exactly a small target.

I’ve temporarily stopped writing on my second attempt at a NaNoWriMo novel. Temporarily, I say! At least I say that for now. It just isn’t as engaging as I’d like. Well, actually I like making all those parallel earths and tell how history unfolded differently on each of them. There are thousands and thousands of parallel earths in that story, although it looks like all of the novel will take place on it. Still, there are people from many others, and the Sixthers have smuggled in books from even others, so there is that.

On the other hand, there is no risk of sex, ever. I mean, ever and ever. The people who are restored to life are immune. They can hug and cuddle but they simply have no sex drive anymore. Also, they don’t die, at least not permanently. Now as my old literature teacher in high school told us, all true poetry is about love and death. And let me add, when the love is platonic and the death is temporary, it does affect the tension level in your writing. Yeah, verily.

Still, I expect to return and write more about the innumerable alternate histories. Someday.

***

In the meanwhile, I have started a story about a guy who is biking to town to buy Skyrim, the fifth Elder Scrolls game, on 11/11/11. (That’s when it comes out in real life! Wheeee!) On his way he crashes into a car and strikes his head. Perhaps fatally, perhaps not, the story so far is very vague in that regard. He begins to have a near-death experience, then suddenly he is sucked away and wakes up in a temple in Daggerfall. Except it all looks lifelike, instead of the low-resolution game graphics. And the sounds and smells are also completely realistic. Furthermore, several hundred years have passed in Tamriel, and magic has risen to a level where it is barely distinguishable from technology. A modern, magical world.

This is something I wrote about in my MoM2000 NaNovel, which erased itself and its backups (except a few hundred words) from my hard disk and made me lose NaNoWriMo that year. Good work! Anyway, that was based on the magical strategy game Master of Magic, and the functional tech level was up to year 2000, only with magic instead of technology.

The Younger Scrolls I: Aleena is based on the series of RPGs called The Elder Scrolls,  of which the first was called Arena. Daggerfall was the second and my all-time favorite, although it was particularly hard on my wrists and so I had to give it up. They are all hards on the wrist, but that one was exceptional. I blame it on having to hold down the right mouse button every time you perform a sword stroke (or warhammer or whatever).

In The Younger Scrolls, magic has become more of a commodity so society has a standard of living similar to Earth in the 20th century. I have not yet learned exactly what the differences are, there certainly are differences.  It is not like every piece of technology in our world has an exact magical equivalent. On the other hand, they have summoning and teleportation – the ability to move people or objects from one place to another in the blink of an eye – although it requires rather a fair bit of magic power and skill.

The name Aleena refers to the name of the main character. The 18 year old boy is called Alvin, but when he wakes up in Tamriel he has the body of a 19 year old girl called Aleena.  She is a Breton – a pale, fair-haired, pudgy race of humans with innate magical resistance and more talent for magic than most humans, although less than elves. They are the most common race in Daggerfall, and judging from my memories (and some screenshots) from the game, the women in Daggerfall had particularly well developed hips and backsides. I used to sneak up on them in the game but the game mechanics had no visuals for pinching them, only a text message. Well, I was younger back then. I believe I got the game in 1994.

Tamriel 500 years after Daggerfall has a higher standard of living and a larger population. Crime, then rampant, is greatly reduced. Farms have replaced much of the wilderness. Still, there is lots of adventure to be had. Racial tensions are high and many-sides (there are numerous humanoid races in Tamriel). And that’s just the civilized ones. Not all wild humanoid races have been fully assimilated. The nymphs have integrated quite well in society, while the centaurs are still rather hostile to outsiders and the goblins, harpies and spriggans are still a barbarian menace, although only on the fringes of civilization. Worse are the werecreatures and the various daedra (corporeal demons) summoned by mad mages alive, dead or undead. Still, as long as you stay clear of the really bad patches on the borders of civilization, New Daggerfall is probably safer than Florida. OK, that was faint praise, I guess.

Will the virgin Alvin have more luck as a lesbian? Will he / she become a famous hero now that he can no longer spend all his days playing The Elder Scrolls and eating chips? Who knows – I have just recently started. 3002 words today.  At this rate, the only way I can reach 50 000 is by writing a novel about some guy writing novels and getting bored after the first chapters so he starts on a new novel. ^_*

 

The inner world

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Concealing a universal wisdom

Are you perhaps concealing a universal wisdom? And if so, how would you know?

Recently I read in a book that is substantially holier than me, about seeking God within. It made a commentary that this was the opposite of introspection. I agree, although there are other opposites of introspection too.

Introspection, as I see it, is looking into your own personality, or “soul with a name”. This is the person we call “I”, and we feel responsible for what this person does and says and, if we are extra serious, even what it thinks. So when we look at the thoughts we have or have had, and how we feel etc, that is introspection. It is looking at our conscious self, although it may have been less conscious than it could have been – that is what we are trying to correct, perhaps.

But the inner world does not only consist of this person, the “I”. There is a lot of activity in there. The subconscious is far larger than the conscious, at least for most of us. Nearly all of us. There may theoretically be some amazing people who are so enlightened and so thoroughly conscious that they occupy their entire brain, but I doubt there is one in each millennium, if there ever were any.

The popular view of the subconscious is roughly identical to Freud’s “Id”: The unfinished basement of our psychological house, where we hide all the things we don’t want to have in the daylight. Mostly sex, if Freud is to be believed, which he certainly shouldn’t be. While Freud was picking apart his patients’ dreams looking for sex symbols (because putting an umbrella in a suitcase is totally a graphic depiction of coitus), C.G. Jung noticed to his surprise that some of the dreams were strikingly similar to well known myths in other cultures, myths that were completely unknown to all but a few researchers in Europe. (This was before the age of the Internet. Today, anyone may have picked up anything. This means we could never have had a discovery like that in our age.)

Sometimes, Jung noticed, people would come across persons in their dreams or daydreams that were far wiser than themselves, although their wisdom was often coached in symbols or poetry that the dreamer had to unpack through a conscious effort. It was, in other words, voluntary (and not easy) to absorb the insights that already existed inside them. It was as if ordinary people had limited themselves to a small part of what they could really have been. Inside them were skills and insights and knowledge that they were not even aware they had.

This, incidentally, is the case also with some patients with “multiple personality syndrome”. In actual life, there is an unknown number of people who have multiple personalities but don’t seek medical treatments, because they get along fine with themselves, and find their multiplicity a strength rather than a weakness. Naturally they soon find out that almost everyone else think it is insane, so they don’t disclose it.

But even among those who do have problems with their multiple personalities (for instance one personality may refuse to share information with the rest, leaving blank spots in their memory, or actively try to hurt their relationships or even their bodies) – even in such cases, it is amazing how much the personalities can vary. They can have completely different skills, and in some cases they even have separate allergies! That sounds like a miracle, or the opposite of a miracle perhaps, whatever that is. But in most cases, the sum of the “alters”  is more than one normal person. In some cases, each personality can be pretty close to normal, and yet they are different, so it really is like there are different people sharing the same brain.

I mention this because you probably think that you are using your brain pretty well, and your subconscious is just a dusty basement with trash you’ve kicked downstairs and shut the door. Chances are there are skills and knowledge and abilities down there which are quite a match for what you have achieved in your waking life, unless you are somewhat of an overachiever. It may even be that some of your energy is spent on denying abilities you actually have: There is at least one documented example of a person who could not draw or paint, but after a brain damage began painting beautiful paintings. Not started learning to paint after the brain damage, but suddenly could do so. They had already had the skill but locked it in the basement. OK, here is an article with a long list of such people and a theory of how.

I know that during my first epoch of deep “emptiness” meditation, in my 20es, I began to be able to think in music. To this day it is pretty common that the “voices in my head” sing songs I have never heard before, either without words or with words in a known or unknown language. I don’t have the skill to write down the music, and I don’t plan to specialize that way, so it disappears after a while. It is no big deal: There will be new music later, probably. So far there has. But I think I would rather be me than to have a stroke or a crushing blow and become able to compose!

But as you can see, the subconscious is not really a corner of your mind. It is like a door that opens to some vastly larger place than your mind. At first it may seem like a mansion, then as a landscape, a planet, finally an expanding universe. There is no reason why the inner world should not be much larger than the visible universe: The possible connections in the human brain exceed the number of molecules in the known universe, or at least so I read when I was young. The thing is, perhaps it is not created by our brain at all? When we look out the window, there is frantic activity in the back of our brain, in the visual cortex. But we don’t usually assume that the brain actually creates the world we see outside our window. Why exactly do we assume that the brain creates all our subconscious content?

Well, what do I know. But it is a topic that would baffle you if you took it seriously. It is a bit like discovering that your wardrobe is a doorway to another world, isn’t it? ^_^ Of course, some of us like it here in the safe zone.

 

That didn’t last long

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“You’re a novel writer?” -Not at the current pace, I’m not. But I have some novel ideas, I guess.

In the early afternoon today, I decided to stop writing on my NaNoWriMo story. It was a stupid idea in the first place. I thought it would be funny, and I guess it is mildly entertaining. But the cognitive dissonance is too much for a neurotypical human to read, and if I only want to read it myself, I can just do so in my head. I guess erotic religious sci-fi humor is just spreading it too thin, spanning too wide, stretching it etc.

And so, because I have the wisdom of Solomon, I have decided to instead write ANOTHER story that I probably won’t publish because it will disturb people no end. It is something I first wrote before I even got my first PC – I am pretty sure I wrote it on a programmable calculator! It is a complete reboot, of course, since I don’t have the original and haven’t seen it in a decade or two.

It is about a young man who drowns and wakes up in a new body, in a world vaguely similar to the one he left, but not the same. He is not in Heaven or Hell or the New Earth or the Millennium or anything like that. His mind was copied by “sixthers”, people who live in 6 dimensions instead of 4, and have a technology that is indistinguishable from magic. Or perhaps it is a magic that is indistinguishable from technology, it is hard to say when two thirds of their reality is entirely off-limit to us.

So anyway our universe is just one of innumerable “bubbles” in this greater 6-dimensional space. There are other people (for lack of a better word) living in even more dimensions, but it is very rare for them to interact with the bubbles in a way that can be observed. Anyway, evidently the sixthers pick certain people just as they are dying and scan the software on their brains, backing it up and installing it in a new and slightly improved body. They wisely choose to never put people back on their own earth, because even in a new body they would try to get back to the old life they were attached to. Now, they have no attachments. They run errands for the sixthers, trying to make their new world a better place. Or that’s the theory. It may be that ordinary people might not always agree with the sixthers about what the world should be like.

I’ve established at the end of chapter 1 that there will be no sex, never ever. Their bodies are designed and produced in some other way, and although they look like ordinary humans, they are unable to feel sexual desire in any physical way. So that should please the Republican readers. I’m trying to not overdo the similarity to Christian resurrection, although obviously that’s where the inspiration comes from. But this story’s “resurrection” is not general, and happens before the final judgment, if any. It is more Lazarus style, I guess, if Lazarus also got some minor body upgrades in the process.

I wonder if I come up with a new idea again tomorrow?

Anyway, never more erotic religious humor. Or at least I’ll keep that to myself. The world is not ready. And that may well be a good thing.