Category Archives: writing

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.

NaNoWriMo is coming!!

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It’s the season for literature!  Hopefully it won’t leave me quite this red-faced, but it is early to say. Written characters tend to take on a life of their own.

Unless something happens over the next five hours or so, I am about to write 50 000 words of erotic religious sci-fi coming-of-age humor. May the Light have mercy on my soul; I have nothing to say in my defense. It is just… NaNoWriMo. Again.

Martin – Martinus Albertus of Little Chicken Springs – lives near the east coast of Vinland (North America in our timeline). He is a high school boy of the less than very manly sort, and an avid “nimyn” (comic book addict, otaku). One day, stung by the accusation that he knows nothing about art despite his expertise in appreciating comics, he goes to the library to check out ancient art. In an art book he finds a picture of the obscure Renaissance painting The Humiliation of St Chronica, in which a female saint was undressed in public by heretical priests, and he has a sudden conversion experience. Religion is not something he is particularly familiar with, and some pretty weird things happen as he and those around him adjust to his new lifestyle.

Perhaps I should just have written about my Sims after all. Oh well. At least my arm is better.

Me, by my side

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I am perhaps the only one who get associations to “the other shore” from this Twinings ad. But that is not what I will write about today.

A friend of mine luckily mentioned this advertisement from Twinings, and provided a handy link. This is a YouTube video, so it may not be suitable for all workplaces even though there is no objectionable content. But it has moving pictures. It has also a song, which in my opinion can be skipped without great loss. It is not inappropriate or ugly, but it does not resonate strongly enough with the animation to be crucial.

\”Twinings gets you back to you\”

For those who cannot see it, this is a short animated video with a slightly watercolor style, especially of the character. A young woman is rowing a small boat alone in the middle of a sea with high waves. She loses one oar and fails to catch it. The waves increase to frightening proportions that would by rights overturn or fill the boat, but strangely instead the waves and the storm conspire to push the boat ever more rapidly forward until it is flying on the top of the waves, and the storm-tossed foam takes the shape vaguely of seagulls flying overhead without losing its character as foam. As the boat lands again, the water rapidly becomes calm and the sky clears up, the boat continuing by its momentum toward a beautiful shore. At the shore someone is waiting. The young woman jumps out of the boat as it stops on the sandy bottom, and wades ashore there to meet her identical twin in a loving embrace. Then as the two line up side by side they seem to fade into one person drinking tea, and the message “Twinings gets you back to you”.

In real life, I would say that under such adverse conditions it would take rather more than tea to bring us back to us. But that is not my message today, gentle reader.

***

Rather, after watching the video clip a few times, I had my own inner vision (albeit dimly) of a potential story for this year’s NaNoWriMo, one appropriately symbolic while detached enough from reality to riff upon, as you say in English.

The story would be about a young man who has a fateful encounter with himself – but not his current self. Rather, a godlike being (in the classical, idiomatic sense, not in the monotheist sense) who may be him from the future, or from an alternate timeline, or a higher reality, or two or more of the above. Basically, his ultimate potential.

Over the last few years I have repeatedly begun writing about a young man meeting a woman from a higher reality – a goddess in the classical sense – who for some reason has decided to seek him out and live with him, although usually others cannot see her at all (and certainly not for who she is). This is basically the Jungian approach, since the Anima is usually the first experience of the numinous for a man, not counting religion as such. Rather, the goddess-complex is normally projected on some woman of his own generation, and it is with this projected ideal woman he falls in love, rather than with the actual person. In real life, amazing women are very rare (I have only really known one offline, outside my own clan) and goddesses are rarer than hen’s teeth.

The upside and downside of the goddess approach is the erotic tension in their living together, which I circumvent in various ways. I like to think that most normal readers will not see a great deal of erotic tension in a person meeting his higher self: Most autoeroticism is pretty far from “higher” in any way I can think of. The downside is that it is probably a larger leap of imagination for the reader, if any. (The “if any” part makes it ideal for NaNoWriMo, which used to have the slogan “quantity over quality”. Not my favorite slogan but somewhat comforting for a write-a-ton.)

***

Being rather far from typical, at least now in my later years, I remember an amusing episode brought about by the voices in my head (which, need I remind you, are not actual hallucinations in my case, but rather streams of thought with some level of independence: People who are unfamiliar with introspection would probably assume they were thinking these thoughts themselves, which is in a certain sense true). The “voices” or muses can sing, however, and do so much of the time, enticing me to sing along. Conversely, they tend to sing along when I play songs I like. This also happened one day while I was listening to a love song by Chris de Burgh, for many years one of my absolute favorite artists (and composer and songwriter).

The song was, appropriately, By My Side, from the album Power of Ten, the first album of his that I bought (although he had been active for a long time by then).

When everything has gone,
you help me carry on;
you lift me up,you make me strong,
you give love to see me through…
Oo-oo-oo what would I do
without you
by my side?

But my voices took a slightly different route: They sang, without me by my side?

Which is kind of appropriate now, I guess. Thanks to Twinings…

 

A little sci-fi by me!

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The “cauldron” to the left is a nano-factory, able to produce a set range of objects by the use of ambient energy and trace materials. The glowing book on the pedestal is able to gradually change the brain function of those who spend enough time reading it. And the telephone to the right is able to resurrect the recently dead – at least some of the time. We also see a glimpse of the Energizer that fully recharges a sim in a matter of minutes using only electricity.

Kristi’s comment about the separation of future humans into knowers and know-nots made me fish out this short piece of sci-fi that I wrote for the game The Sims 2, to explain the appearance of Magic in the final expansion pack for that game. Set in the Sims universe, the people there are called sims, and obviously this is a work of fiction, not even intended to be true. After all, the future usually comes while we look the other way, right? ^_^

 

Artificial intelligence never lived up to its promises. The Age of Transcend therefore began around 2045, when adventurous sims began implanting multiple wireless computer interfaces in their brains. Through these, main parts of their brains had access to virtually unlimited knowledge, processing power, pure logic and funny cat pictures. At first, insanity and death was common, one often leading to the other. But the survivors used their greatly enhanced skills to solve the problems, and around 2050 it was becoming safe to become such a greatly augmented human. From now on, they used their superhuman skills to improve their superhuman skills, and by around 2055 had reached the level of “Weakly Godlike Superintelligence”. At this point, any discoveries and inventions they made were impossible to explain to a mere human, although they could certainly be demonstrated, and in a few cases even copied by slavishly following the template given by the Transcend.

It was also in 2055 that the Transcend, as they were now collectively named, invited anyone who wanted to join their rank. Perhaps surprisingly, most sims preferred to stay on a merely human level – or perhaps they just never got around to do anything about it. In any case, only a tiny minority joined the Transcend, although the number was more than an order of magnitude higher than the 144000 later bandied about by legends. Some historians think as many as one in thousand joined the Transcend, and it was invariably the most talented, adventurous and creative who did so. During this third phase, the Transcend had little to do with ordinary sims. Whatever they did, it took place in virtual realms, or in outer space, or in other dimensions. They left the world alone – and eventually, in 2060, they left the world altogether. After announcing “Our work here is complete”, on the night of Passover, 2060, all the Transcend disappeared bodily from Sim Earth and were never heard of again. Whether “here” referred to this planet, this galaxy, this universe or even this general type of universe, they were gone without a trace. Well, apart from the few mysterious inventions they had deigned to share with simkind five years ago, known from now on as “Transcend relics”. Intentionally, perhaps as some kind of joke on our expense, these objects were frequently made to look like arcane items from folklore: Wands, broomsticks, grimoires, cauldrons. But they also left behind a substantial medical knowledge, advanced robotics, and the technology of teleportation.

The world after the Transcend was a strange place: Bereft of almost all genius, it became a thoroughly mundane place, technologically stagnant yet prospering by the few crumbs fallen from the table of those who had left us behind.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” -Arthur C. Clarke.

“Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don’t understand it.” -Florence Ambrose.

Even more fiction

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“Why are they so perceptive at a time like this?” Because they have read Books of the Truth! But this works a bit differently in this world and my fictional world.

I am still slowly working on the 1001st Book. Vaguely related to the topic of yesterday, but not too directly (because this is fiction, and for teens and tweens mainly). It seems obvious to me that those wizards who have absorbed a particular book, and has the sigil inside themselves, are also able to recognize the same sigil in other wizards. More widely, they can recognize that topic anywhere.

For instance, the 1002nd book is by ancient tradition the Way of Truth. (The complete works of Thoth are collectively referred to as “Books of Truth”, which may be why it is called Way instead of Book, unlike for instance the Book of Light and the Book of Air which describe the true nature of those two things in general, and so on.)  Anyway, once the Wizard has absorbed the book sufficiently, he will be able to recognize truth wherever he sees it. And likewise when he sees deviation from the truth, he will notice this, and to some extent what is missing or exaggerated or otherwise just not right.

Anyway, it is a pretty classical magic thing, I guess, the supernatural ability wizards have to evaluate each other. So it is only natural that I weave it into the story. That there happens to be something vaguely similar in the world in which I live does not hurt, but it is certainly not autobiography I write this time. Despite the lack of actual sex. When writing about teenagers, that is probably going to seem less likely than the magic to some. But miracles do happen!

 

More imaginary magic books

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There is no end to the writing of books!

I recently wrote about my latest fiction project, tentatively called The 1001st Book. It is based on an ancient archetype of the wizard as a person who has first and foremost knowledge. In modern role-playing games and many fantasy novels, being a mage is something you are born to. You still need to memorize spells in some cases, but that is pretty much it. That is not how it used to be! In times of old, the wizard was both feared and respected, not just for his power but for his knowledge. The wizard was old and, well, wizened. A long life of poring over esoteric tomes had given him an uncanny knowledge of things beyond mortal ken.

I have realized in retrospect that what I am trying to do is modernize this archetype. And I try to do so by starting at the point where the wizard diverges from the ordinary people, the “muggles” or whatever they are called these days. This happens when he first begins studying esoteric books: Books of hidden knowledge, but usually hidden in plain sight.

Not to get excessively autobiographical here, but I dabble in esoteric books myself, and I can see how this would generally require some maturity to even get started.

Another influence on this particular piece of fiction is the Japanese new religion Happy Science and the valiant attempts by its founder to make religious knowledge available for people of average intelligence or even a little below. I recently saw (in a computer game, of all places) theology explained this way: “It’s like religion, but with more deep-thoughtiness.” It is this deeper thinking that is glaringly absent in most religious people you will hear of, and probably also most you will meet. They have some basic knowledge, but they don’t have a deep, wide understanding.

But this story is not about theology or Happy Science. Rather it points back to the traditional wizard archetype, where esoteric knowledge spilled over into the physical world, a literal understanding of “knowledge is power”. It was thought that a wizard could command various spirits, or knew hidden properties of plants or stones or animals, or could consult the stars. By combining diverse parts of this wide-ranging knowledge, he could accomplish things that seemed miraculous to ordinary people.

In The 1001st Book, each of the 20 000 Books of Truth contain just one arcane sigil. The rest of each book explains the concept which the sigil represents, the true knowledge associated with it, and its place in the grand scheme of things. While the lines drawn to shape the sigil are indeed memorized, the rest of the tome has to be understood. It is a process of cognition and cogitation, so to speak. You have to understand it and think about it. Only when you have fully understood the concept and its implications, can you use the sigil – an ancient word for “seal”, see Latin “sigillum Sanctum”, holy seal. (Possibly also Hebrew “segulah”, meaning an esoteric component or some such.) For the purpose of this fiction, we shall assume that the sigil is the seal on the knowledge of the book: It sums up and represents the deep and wide understanding the reader has acquired.

Needless to say, the power of this knowledge increases as you add more books, and become able to see the connections between all kinds of things. It does not just add up, it multiplies, because you can combine them in all kinds of interesting ways.

So how do you stay alive long enough to read hundreds or even thousands of heavy tomes? Ancient portrayals of wizards usually showed them as very ancient, and it was assumed that their art kept them alive. In my story, I have a somewhat more straightforward explanation: The Gift of Thoth, as it is called by the locals, comes from the fact that the magician does not age while occupied with the Art. Whether studying on the tomes, meditating on the sublime Truth learned in them, or actually using the Art in practice, the magician is in a state of  “otherness”, in which the mind is under the sway of the Spirit World rather than the material world.

This is an extension of a topic I wrote about (non-fiction, to the best of my knowledge) recently: That certain activities seem to prolong your life by about as much as you spend on them. In real life, religious participation and meditation seem to be among these. So it is no big leap of imagination to extend this to study of Books of Truth.

As for the actual scenes, these often come while I take a walk. This is the usual for me and fiction. The best length seems to be 10-20 minutes. Much less and I don’t have time for a full scene to form in my head. More, and my brain buffer overflows and I have to repeat the text I have written in my head so it doesn’t disappear. (It still changes a bit when I write it down, but usually is still recognizable.)

I know I have written before about walking and getting fiction “revelations”, but it still works that way, and it may be useful for whoever is reading this. It is unlikely that anyone would read this far unless they are into fiction writing themselves, right?

1001st book worldbuilding

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Thoth, god-king of Atlantis, as imagined by a contemporary Japanese artist. (From the movie The Laws of Eternity, although this is not about that.)

As if I had nothing better to do, I came up with yet another story. It has potential, I think, but probably not a lot of potential. We’ll see. As usual what I write about here is mainly the “worldbuilding”, the setting of the story, not the plot, if such a thing even exists. I usually leave that to the muses in my head.

The protagonist is a 15 year old boy, but that is kind of incidental. The point is, he has read 1000 books. He did not know the exact number, although it seems reasonable when he is told so by a new librarian at the town library. She gives him a book called The 1001st Book, which will probably be the title of my book as well if I complete it. Unless someone has used that name already, which is certainly possible: There is no end to the writing of books, according to Ecclesiastes.

The book he is given is a fantasy novel about some guy in a world where magic exists but modern technology does not. Magic is not something you are born to, anyone could become a magician, but it seems to happen only to bookish people. The reason, we learn from the book, is that you can only become a magician after having read and understood 1000 books. It does not matter what books. After this, you will be given the 1001st book, which tells you the truth about magic, and toward the end of the book, teaches you the Attalan Runes.

The Runes are a syllabic script (which I currently imagine to be similar to hiragana or katakana in Japanese, not that I am saying so in the text). Once you master the Runes, you can go on to learn the Sigils of Mu, representing words or concepts (which I imagine as similar to kanji in Japaese). It is in this script that the secrets of the world are written, which magicians need to know in order to master the forces of the world.

After reading the book, the main character (of my book, not the book he is reading) begins to dream that he is in that other world he read about. The dream is very lifelike. It is in this dreamworld that he will find the 1002nd and later books. Over time, it will become more and more uncertain which world is the most real.

The 1002nd book is the first of the 20 000 Books of Truth, written 12 000 years ago by Thoth, god-king of Attalan. It was also he who established the practice of offering the teachings of magic to those who had read 1000 books.  Thoth is believed by the locals to have been the incarnation of a god, not the Creator but the protector and guide of this particular planet. The line between gods and the most powerful magicians is somewhat blurry, but Thoth was more powerful and wiser than any of them.

It is said that this god incarnates in the world from time to time when history needs it, and if someone ever reads and understands all the 20 000 Books of Truth, that person will be proved to be the reincarnation of Thoth. But so far that has never happened. This is because there are many branches of knowledge, and they seem to be mutually exclusive: When you have studied one of them, the opposite branch becomes meaningless, mere incomprehensible babble. And the other way around: They who have studied the opposite branch, will not be able to study the first one.

(If you thought that last part far-fetched, you may want to lend a helping hand to the people teaching respectively quantum physics and relativity…)

Occasionally some magician is able to reconcile two branches of magic by seeing them both from a much higher perspective, and this person gains the wisdom and power of a god. But so far no one has been able to combine them all, or even nearly all. It is believed that only the Rebirth of Thoth can do that.

So, is my main character actually the reincarnation of Thoth? Perhaps not, but that is beside the point for now.  I am still just sketching out the world and some of the characters and some of the plot for the first book. You don’t become a god over the course of a single book, you know. Not even a small god. Definitely not Thoth, god-king of Attalan.  ^_^

***

In case it was not obvious, this is based on real-world legends. Thoth is an Egyptian god of wisdom and writing, which was later identified with Hermes Trismegistus,  Thrice-great Hermes. They were both renowned for having written thousands of books, although only a few scattered writings remain from Hermes. Of Thoth, as far as I know, only legends remain. A much more recent vision has placed his whereabouts in ancient Atlantis.

Whatever the historical events that gave rise to these legends, their now thoroughly mythical nature today makes them well suited to include in such a story, I think. Unless someone else has written it already. There is no end to the writing of books, after all!

 

Trade(off) day

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Who is the mysterious Taiyou Sorano, and why does he teach people that their soul, rather than the body, is their real self?  (Promotional picture from animated movie “The Rebirth of Buddha”.)

If you wonder why this is not about my moving to a new apartment today, that’s because it is delayed till Tuesday. As far as I am concerned, it could be delayed for another ten years and I would not complain (much), despite the icy cold winters and the poor bus connections. Anyway, until then, life more or less goes on.

***

Today was Trade Day in Kristiansand, the city where I work.

Extremely regular readers will know that this day is a recurring temptations to two groups of people. One is the chubby women from the surrounding villages who are drawn to the super cheap (and mostly useless) goods that are on near fire sale this one day. The other is me, who is drawn to the chubby women. Even though I don’t have any further designs on them, they are still a pleasant sight.

After the youthful lusts subsided a few years ago, I generally felt it was OK to look at women as long as I took care to not stare or otherwise appear suspicious. It certainly did not contradict the Golden Rule (do unto others etc). It was not like I wanted to pry them away from their husbands, if any, and mate with them myself.

However, after being exposed to a higher degree of spiritual light, I started to pay more attention to the “compass needle of the mind” as Ryuho Okawa fittingly calls it, and found that it can move greatly even when the body does not respond in the way of men. So I have recalibrated, as it were. This way, I can have the struggle of temptations all over again in my advanced age. Wheee!

***

In the evening, I watched my copy of an old Happy Science movie, Hermes – Winds of Love. It is actually the only Happy Science movie you can buy in American without going through a Happy Science temple, I believe. For some reason it was a hit in Japan and a flop in America. I guess the cultural difference was too large. (And of course, Ryuho Okawa is a household name in Japan, although I am not sure if it was that when the movie came out. It looks really old.)

Apart from whatever encouragement it may bring me personally, the movie also set a great mood for working on my JulNoWriMo novel. JulNoWriMo is like the less gifted younger cousin of NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. Even the name is stumbling a bit: “July Novel Writing Month” does not really make much sense. But it is an excuse to write again, so I’m on it, although with the move and all, I don’t expect to come anywhere near 50 000 words.

Like last NaNoWriMo, my attempt is a first-person story by a member of the TSI, the Taiyou Sorano Institute, the equivalent of Happy Science in the parallel world seen in the movie The Rebirth of Buddha, conveniently made by Happy Science. Both of my stories take place in the USA, which is not shown in the movie, so I have expanded it with features from the real-world Happy Science and my own imagination. I feel it is pretty true to the spirit of the movie though. Of course, as a fanfic I can’t actually sell it or anything, so it is more like a writing exercise.

The second story is not a sequel. It features another main character with a completely different background. But of course after a summary of his earlier pathetic life, he has an encounter with the Truth and learns Master Sorano’s Teachings of the Mind, and his life changes for the better. Cute girls and spiritual adventures in the Other World are waiting, but it is bedtime now.

Interdimensional worldbuilding

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What if the aliens were… us, as we could have been?

So the muses in my head are a-musing me with a new story set in a new world. Actually the background is more interesting than the story. (Usually not a good sign, but I am not being paid for this so I write what I’d like to read.)

So this all starts in the very near future, when off-world visitors appear in public for the first time. They don’t land in front of the White House or even in Beijing, but at St. Peter’s Square in Rome / the Vatican. A man in shining white meets with the Pope and later holds a press conference. He is a high-ranking member of the Imperial family in the Empire of 1000 worlds. Despite the humble name, the Empire actually counts over 7000 worlds and is still growing. But these worlds are mostly alternate versions of our Earth, in different time lines.

We are here not talking about time lines where Hitler won World War 2 or the Viking colonized America. Rather it seems that each of the time lines separated when the first human became self-aware. In the hub of the Empire, which is called Earth Prime, civilization is about 100 000 years old, and most of the others are also older than ours. The collected science and technology of all these worlds is now wielded by the Empire, and 99.9% of this looks like magic to everyone on Earth.

The Empire has no intention of invading Earth, assures its messenger. It is entirely dedicated to spreading love and happiness through the multiverse. They just happened to think some of us might want to join them. Quite possibly all of us, eventually, but it would have to be voluntary.

The messenger, the Oldest Living Son of the Emperor, also obliquely hints at being connected with the world’s great religions, possibly, and with the kick-starting of civilization on Earth in the first place. He is rather vague on these matters though.

The further backdrop of the story is how mankind reacts – or fails to react – to this First Contact and meeting a number of cultures utterly different from ours. The plot is about one young man, fresh out of high school at the time, who decides to throw in his lot with the Empire. But there could be any number of stories written in this multiverse.  Is the Empire really a pure force for good? And even if they intend to do good, what will the real effect be on mankind? Will it crush our spirit, incite us to rebellion, or just fail to make an impression when no further invasion fleet appears?

Well, there may already be stories written about something like that. There is no end to the writing of books, and I have not read them all. It would be typical if someone else had written something like that already.

But the beauty of the Empire is that it has no aliens, and yet almost nothing but aliens. There are worlds with furries (artificially merging human and animal traits), worlds without grownups (where people remain childlike in appearance and size throughout their lives), worlds where people never put on clothes except to have sex, worlds where the moon is densely populated and worlds where it is a billboard. And every technology is magic to those who don’t understand it: You may be able to casually walk through walls yet baffled at the sight of an eeePad.

It is a fun place for me to write, even if I never plan to have it published. And even if I don’t have much time for it, really.

Alien fiction revisited

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Actually, aliens seem to be particularly popular in Japan. But there’s always Smallville, Kansas, too.

I dug out my old box with Smallville Season 1 on DVD. Bought and paid, from Amazon.co.UK, I think. Definitely legit, original box and all. I have like five or six of these. Although if I were to get the rest, I would probably get them from Pirate Bay or something. It is pretty good for TV, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve paid much more for these than they are worth. This is the kind of stuff one should rent, not buy, but there’s no obvious place to do that here in Norway. So it is buying or copying. Or a bit of each, I guess.

Actually I mostly wanted to hear the theme song, Somebody save me, an old favorite of mine. Even as late as then, I kind of felt a bit like that. Like I wasn’t really saved. And like it was all about me. Well, I guess if one is to write an online journal almost every day, “all about me” is a useful attitude to have. But it is kind of fading, or at least changing.

Watching the first couple episodes (nostalgic, it is really around a decade?) I began to think of my own alien fiction, which I have rebooted a number of times. I vaguely remember four instances of it, there may have been a fifth. It seems to never quite get off the ground. So I do another “Kami reboot” as I call them when I write about it here. The main character is not named Kami, of course. Rather a kami is a generic name for a deity or spirit in Japanese, at least in the Shinto religion. Even dead people become honorary kami. So in this particular fiction of mine, the kami are actually aliens who live in small numbers on Earth and on many other planets. They are millions of years more advanced than us, and can shapeshift using their alien technology. (Not on the spot – they need to rebuild the body so it is a pretty big deal, but the resulting body can be whatever they decide, including human.) Earth is considered a great place for them to raise kids, so they hide among us and when the kid grows up – which may take a hundred years or more – to reach its full powers, it leaves Earth to travel among the stars.

So the story is about this high school kid who is actually an alien. That’s the connection with Smallville, there really isn’t much else in common. No Kryptonite, no supervillains. Which may be why even I don’t find it interesting enough to write for long…

Strangely I found only one of the reboots. Or perhaps it was even the original. It was the one in which the boy knew and had always known that he was an alien. (In most of the reboots he was only told so sometime during high school.) He still felt kind of human when he was among them, and secretly wished he could be human. No, it is not autobiographical…  I can’t remember ever having felt that longing to be human. ^_^

Not very exciting, I know! Oh, and I downloaded and installed VLC, the free open source video player, since the DVD did not show properly in MicroSoft Media Player. The pictures were square instead of rectangular, so everyone looked ridiculously tall and thin in full-screen mode. VLC, which is open source software made by volunteers, rendered it perfectly.