“Into the West”

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“What can you see on the horizon? Why do the white gulls call? Across the sea, a pale moon rises; the ships have come, to carry you home. And all will turn to silver glass; light on the water, all souls pass.”

For about two days, this song has kept playing in my mind. Not quite continually, but pretty much at any time when I was not concentrating enough on something else to crowd it out. I found myself humming it at various times and places, albeit softly (because after rarely ever speaking for two decades, my vocal cords cannot speak or sing except softly and briefly, for which I am mostly thankful.)

What is particularly bothersome about this song, unlike others that may have a special promotion weekend on my brain at other times, is that it is about death. It is all phrased very poetically, and so that a young child hearing the song will mistake it for a lullaby. But to the adult (and older child, probably) it is clearly about the immediate passing away of a loved one. As such, I hope with all my heart that it is not an omen in any way for anyone. Personally I like to think that it suddenly came before me because of the surge of interest in the Hobbit movie, which also has shown up in my Google+ stream. Thus my memory of the previous Tolkien blockbuster and the departure of the hobbit main character into the West.

Yet in Tolkien’s story, the hobbit leaves across the sea to live forever with the elves and their demigods; but to those left behind, hobbits and men, they had only the words of the elves for this, if even that. It was only a hope, whereas his parting from them was definite and final. “To part is to die a bit” say the French, and with a parting such as this, it was very much so. It was to die completely from everyone and everything he had held dear in his old life, if he had not already done so in his heart.

I wonder if I would have been able to do that.

When my great-grandfather was young, many people sailed here from Norway into the west to seek a new life in America. They had no illusion of living forever, but they hoped for a better life. They also left behind most of what they knew and had relied on until that day. But unlike our hobbit friend, they knew it was physically possible to return. The ships sailing back were as many as those who sailed over in the first place, although they had fewer passengers. If I remember correctly, one of my ancestors (great-grandfather or great-great grandfather, I can’t remember) actually went to America, but returned after some years. If not, I would have been an American. (Actually, I would not have existed in anything like my current form, but there might have been another descendant around my age instead.)

But when the time comes to cross The River, it will be a final journey, to an unimaginably distant shore, if we reach it at all – it is a journey we cannot watch on a documentary in advance or travel in the comforting company of relatives or neighbors. I hope to board together with my Invisible Friend when the time comes, but to be honest, I am in no hurry. No hurry at all.

“Into the West” – Annie Lennox – Spotify. And on YouTube, complete with heart-tugging comments, until the appropriate corporation sees fit to remove it.

Time flies…

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Time flies while we’re having fun, and so do I. Fly while having fun. Flying is somewhat more complex in Champions Online than in City of Heroes, but it is still nice to do sometimes.

Between Memrise (see previous entry), Champions Online (see earlier entry), a bit of Sims 3 and a bit of fiction writing, the days just roll off the conveyor belt. Especially workdays, I usually don’t leave until close to 5 or close to 5:30, depending on which bus I aim for. It is already dark when I come home. Dark and icy cold, so no jogging anymore.

In Champions Online, I discovered a light-based class, or archetype as they call it. One of the two initial powers is a long-distance ray of light that will heal heroes but hurt villains. I’m starting to like this game! It’s not City of Heroes but then nothing is.

A downside to experimenting with heroism and Japanese for hours is that I don’t get to read the good books I thought I would. Pretty much every day I plan to get some reading done, sometimes I even pick out a book, but in the end I don’t actually read it. Perhaps just a little, but not seriously. I need to rebalance this. But first I have memories of Japanese phrases to water.

Memrise!

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Tiny angels of curiosity

Are you insatiably curious? Then this website may be for you.

I have found another fun thing to do: Memrise, a website that teaches things, mostly vocabulary of foreign languages. Of course, there are many such websites, but this one uses state of the art psychology which lets you learn better using less time.

By “less time” I mean less time in total, when you sum up the hours of your life you have spent on learning the thing. It does not mean that you can sit down the night before an exam and learn at superspeed. One of the three “legs” on which this method stands is spaced repetition, which I have written about before (SuperMemo and Mnemosyne.) But this time it is combined with two other “legs”:  Mnemonics and motivation.

Mnemonics is the use of images or other associations which we connect to a random piece of information. Except for small children, most people have a hard time remembering something that is unrelated to everything else. The more vivid, amusing or emotional the association, the easier it will be to remember. If it also is associated with something we think about regularly, the energy that flows through the neural pathways will spill over on something associated. The best mnemonics therefore are those which we associate with ourselves, because we tend to think of ourselves a lot. This site cannot really help with that, but every piece of random data comes with a number of “mems”, images or thoughts that can make it easier to remember. Not as good as making your own, but easy and reasonably effective.

Memory refreshment, or spaced repetition, is the art of reviewing something just before you have forgotten it. This is the ideal time. If you review it while you still remember it easily, the effect is less. If you review it after you have forgotten it, you have to put more energy into re-learning it. The website remembers when you learned each word or fact, and even sends you a mail to remind you. At first, you repeat every few seconds or minutes during the main drill, but then it can take half an hour, four hours, 12 hours… it depends on how many times you have already reviewed it and how well you did. If you keep acing your reviews, it could soon be days or weeks. If you fail miserably, you will have to return to it soon.

Unfortunately, the calculation completely ignores work and sleep, so it is unlikely to work too well in the intermediate range, when you are supposed to review in a few hours. By then you are probably asleep or at work, hopefully not both at the same time!

Motivation is the third and often ignored factor. Most electronic teaching systems assume that you are already motivated by an external factor, and that may well be true. But this one has taken a leaf from the popular Facebook games (or “social games” now that we have Google+ and other venues for them). In these social games, people come back every day or even several times a day to water and harvest their plants or do other boring task to get some small imaginary reward, especially when they can share these with their friends. Memrise uses the same model. The initial learning of a word or fact is called planting a seed. Later you return to water it by testing your knowledge of the word after some hours. Finally you can harvest it into your long-term memory. You get points for each successful action, and your “wealth” of points is visible to your Memrise friends. (My name is itlandm4b by the way.)

As already mentioned, the website will mail you when you need to return to water or harvest your memories. You can also see if you go into each course how long it is until your next interaction with each plot of verbal crops. I have a lot that fall due in 12 hours, when I will hopefully be at work. This thing may be better suited for students. But no worries, if I fail miserably, I will simply have to return to them faster than I otherwise would. The game… er, teaching site keeps track of each individual fact, helping us work more on the difficult ones and less on the easy ones … for us personally, not some imaginary average person.

To keep track of everything and mail you when needed, the site needs you to register. You can create a new account or log in with Facebook. Unfortunately it does not take any of the other popular identity managers, like Google or Twitter or OpenID. Then again, it is free. If you don’t like having to create a new account, you don’t need to. But you may lose out on some of the most entertaining learning, or most instructive fun, on the web.

Wait! If it is free, how does it pay its bills? Well, so far it survives on generous investors, it seems. The plan is to take a cut of for-profit courses, but so far these are notable only by their absence. This may not bode well for the future of the website. But on the other hand, expenses are probably moderate as well: The users are making pretty much all the courses. After developing the software, the founders basically just need to run the server, and people contribute everything from single mnemonics to complete courses. So hopefully it will be around for a while. By then I should have learned thousands of new things. Perhaps. Or I might flutter off like a butterfly to the next flower. You know how I am with such things. Time flows differently for me. A month is an ocean of time, at least until it is over…

http://www.memrise.com/

Imaginary heroism: Resumed!

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“The price is that it changes your personality in the real world.” The anime Sword Art Online, which is about the virtual reality online games of the near future, supports the school of thought which we may call “habituation”, that our behavior in online games gradually affects our behavior in the real world. The opposite, the “catharsis” theory, says that people in games get an outlet for tendencies that might otherwise build up and be expressed in real life. It would be nice to know which was true right now.

OK, I have now actually tried Champions Online, and it is very similar to City of Heroes. It is more cartoonish in style, both the graphics and the atmosphere are closer to a comic book than the more realistic terrains of CoH. The control system is a little more confusing too. But overall, it is probably the closest thing, which is not so strange since it was made by the same developing house (although many of the artists and developers stayed with CoH when NCSoft bought it up.) And it does have the clear-cut morality, you know right away who are the good guys, and you get to rescue civilians from the clutches of evil. (For some reason, only evil has clutches? And cars, I guess, but I never hear of the clutches of good.)

Anyway, I should probably solemnly consider whether I should continue to fight imaginary evil on my free time or choose a more peaceful way to employ my mind for whatever time I may have left. I guess each has its benefits. Having my favorite crime-fighting game disappear beneath me may have been a helping hand from Heaven, or at least an opportunity from fate. Then again, it may be said that this self-satisfaction of the justice instinct may also contribute to strengthening it, and to maintain a lawful good self-image that will hopefully spill over into everyday life.

I mean, it is widely assumed by the populace that if someone satisfies their sexual drive by computer animation of child molestation, even though no actual children are involved, this person is probably capable of doing the same in real life, and may even become gradually more intent on doing so. (Scientists are not so sure of this, but then there is a lack of test subjects, for obvious reasons.) Logic dictates that by the same measure, people who derive pleasure from doing good in a virtual world, may be inclined to do good in the real worlds as well. I can’t say I have seen a lot of that in my life, but hey. At least I am not much of a force for evil, which is pretty good considering my youth.

That said, I wonder whether I should follow through with my original plan of limiting my game time to The Sims, a very peaceful and constructive single-player game. Or even cut out gaming to spend my time reading and writing good books. But the latter would be rather a big shift. I think I would have to feel very sick to stop gaming altogether…

Writing fiction is easy

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It was a dark and not particularly stormy night. Self-Sim was sitting in front of his old computer…

Writing is easy – it is writing well that is hard. But not everyone will agree with this, at least not with the first part. During this year’s National Novel Writing Month (“NaNoWriMo“), I have had a couple interesting discussions about “filler” or “padding”. NaNoWriMo has a quantity goal, not a quality goal, or not much of one. The idea is to write 50 000 words of a new novel during the month of November. Novels are usually longer than that, but 50 000 words in 30 days is already stretching it for a new writer (and some not-so-new writers as well).

In order to reach the goal of 50 000 words in 30 days, people have taken to various tricks: Not using contractions, always writing a person’s full name (and sometimes those names can get ridiculously long), writing out the lyrics of songs that are playing during a scene, random appearances of ninjas, etc etc.

I have mixed feelings about this. Not so much the contractions, they are overused anyway, and many Americans do not seem able to use them correctly anymore. But quotations, writing without thinking, I am opposed to. Quotations in fiction should only be used when they are important to the story. If you hear a song or a speech that changes your life, quoting the relevant lines is important. If a song is playing in the background while you are doing something else, the lyrics are probably irrelevant.

Still, there is padding and there is padding. Mindless writing is something I cannot really recommend, even if it gets your word count up. There are better ways to do that. A padding that is not just a padding. I think we could call it “reporting from an imaginary world.”

***

When we say to newcomers: “Just write”, we really mean writing their own creation. But it does not need to be good, or even part of the plot. For instance, describe the place where something happens. Is it a room? If so, there are probably windows and doors leading to other places. There is probably furniture, most likely some kind of decorations. Does a teen girl’s room have stuffed animals, or does it have half finished toy planes and a tube of glue? Are there framed pictures, and if so, who or what is depicted? Is the room tidy or messy? If there are objects on the floor, what kind of objects? Blue jeans, black underwear, a dog-eared copy of Scientific American? Putting this down on paper is writing, regardless of whether it makes it into the published novel, yes, regardless of whether that particular novel is ever published. This is the kind of work writers do.

Farmers farm, teachers teach, writers write. Even if you have to scrap most of what you write now, even if you have to scrap all of it, writing is what you do. There is no way around it. (Well, you can use voice recognition software, but that only moves the writing from your fingers to your mouth.) You want to write something that makes you rich and famous, or if you are like me, you want to write something that can lift the spirit of men and women and give them hope and courage in the ages after your passing. But that is like winning a 5 kilometer race in the World Championship. First you have to grasp hold of the dinner table so you can get up and stand on your two feet. That is how you begin becoming a world champion. Writing all those lyrics are like that, it is OK for a week or two or three, but then you must let go and start on the terrible and frightening adventure of walking unaided, of writing what you see in a world no one else can see until you have opened it for them.

Every world has virtually infinite reach in space and time, and infinite depth of detail. In time, you will have to select what to report from that overwhelming flood of information. But at first, when you drill your first holes through the barrier between worlds, there is no torrent. You can barely get anything out with a drinking straw. Keep writing, but keep writing from the other side of that wall. Not this one. Look around. Listen. If worst comes to worst, smell. Watch the way people (or elves) sit, the way their eyes shift, their quirks and tics. It is probably not important, but if nothing important is going on at the moment, this is what you’ve got, and it is your duty to report it. It may never reach the printing press, but that’s the way the world is. Tell it anyway.

You may think that those who write amazing novels, that they happened to see an interior movie that was simply that amazing, and they just wrote it down. Well, I guess that can happen too. But quite likely they choose the best 80 000 words out of perhaps a million or more that reached their paper / computer screen. Or, for the particularly skilled, their brain cortex. But if you are still starting out, you can probably not keep a million words in your brain, so use the computer hard drive instead. Think of it as an extension of your brain. You are a writer. Writing is what you do.

Actually, planning is what you will do, probably before you publish anything longer than a school essay. Planning is underrated, to say the least. But there is nothing wrong with diving in, even while your plan is still sketchy – perhaps even all in your head – and take a look around. Who are these people, how are they living, what are they doing? Make your world come to life. Remember, the possibilities in a human brain exceeds those in the visible universe. You can create worlds without end, or as long as you live and retain your mind. Unlimited space, unlimited time, unlimited detail. The story behind a stuffed toy or a faded photograph may be enough to fill a book all on its own. All there waiting for you to write it down. And write, and write. You are a writer, it is what you do.

The end of a world

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“Even if this world ends today, I will still protect you.”

November 30 marks the end of the online multiplayer game City of Heroes, which has been running since April 2004. I was actually playing it already when it was in closed beta, and was impressed. In my first review of it here, I described the game world as “a believable world, but larger than life: Beautiful and dangerous like the first weeks of love.” This may explain why I kept playing it till the end. But it is more than that: It was the goodest game I have ever played.

I don’t mean just that it was technically good, which it also was. The controls in particular was superior to any multiplayer game I have played before or since. But more importantly, there was an inherent goodness in roleplaying a hero constantly protecting people from danger, and defeating evil. (In the game, the concept “defeat” was always used. It was implied that nobody was ever killed in the epic superpowered battles. If a hero was defeated, they would immediately recover at the hospital, and it was assumed that a prison hospital would receive the villains.)

It should surprise no one that a game like this attracted a special type of players, a bit different from the ones playing elves and rangers, jedis and space traders. Comic book fans, of course, but it appealed to a particular temperament. Its players tended to be friendly, helpful, tolerant and mature in a way I never really saw in other games. (Although there was some of it, of course. Dark Age of Camelot gave me some happy memories back in the day too.) Over the years, these people have stayed with the game, to the very last. Sometimes couples were playing together, or parents and their grown children, or friends who had moved to different places but met up in this virtual world. Many new friendships were also made in the game, and it is likely that these people would have continued to play for another decade if they had a chance. But that chance disappeared.

NCSoft, a Korean company that bought the rights to the game some years ago, suddenly decided this fall to close it down. This came as a shock: The game had shaken off two newer competitors and was growing. It was running a profit, and new content was arriving at a brisk pace. Suddenly one day it was announced that the game would soon be closed, and the whole developer team was fired immediately. The reason given was that the company wanted to concentrate on its core (that is, Korean games, translated to English for the international market). I am not overly surprised. CoH is a very American game, and America has gone from being cool to embarrassing over these same years. Americans are probably not aware of this.

Be that as it may. This is not a day I want to spend talking about politics. Today I want to remember the “goodest” game I have ever played, the wonderful people I met and shared a beautiful, colorful dream with. The heart that made you thrive in such a place, will still be beating elsewhere.

People are bewildered that life must end
And time strikes them harshly.
But even if this world ends today,
I will still protect you.

(The end of the world, by Angela. YouTube. Translated by Suri-chan. )

Snoopy’s Christmas

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My childhood hero. This explains so much about me, doesn’t it? ^_^

When I was still a boy on a small farm in western Norway and had not yet learned English, this song must have appeared on radio, for my brother had captured it on his tape recorder. I think this was our first tape recorder, before my second brother got his hands on one of those newfangled cassette recorders. So yeah, back in the days.

I loved the song obsessively, but I was too young to understand the lyrics except a few words here and there. My brother claimed the song said Snoopy was dead, but I defiantly refused to believe it. My hero could not die that casually. (Besides, my brother did not exactly have a sterling reputation for upholding the truth…) I assumed he was just trying to torment me, but now that I have access to the lyrics, I realize that my brother, although older than me, might not have been familiar with the idiom of having someone “dead in their sight”, meaning aiming straight at them. Still, the context should have given it away.

I played the melody of the chorus over and over on my toy xylophone, quite probably driving the rest of the family nuts. I still remember the melody now decades later, and I would not be surprised if the surviving members of my birth family remember it too, although less fondly. ^_^

We named our next dog Snoopy, with quite a bit of input from my side, I’m afraid. He wasn’t even a beagle, but he was the smartest dog I’ve met so far. How much this song contributed to that event, I am not sure. But the Norwegian translation of Peanuts has another name for the dog, so it is likely that the name came from this song or another.

Months became years, and the song was lost to me. Years became decades, and I occasionally whistled the melody to myself during happy moments, in this way keeping it alive as one generation of Peanuts fans gave birth to the next. But knowing nothing of the lyrics except “Snoopy” and “Red Baron”, I had no hope of finding it again.

Today, I took the time to look through my “stream” in Google+, the social network for Google users. I have only a few people there who could reasonably be called friends, and who I try to keep updated on. But sometimes I have the time to read acquaintances with similar interests (many of them writers, published or otherwise). One of these semi-friends happened to post, on this particular day and time, a link to a YouTube video with the song: Snoopy’s Christmas.

I thanked her profusely, of course. I was kind of touched by this unexpected reunion between a boy and his favorite song after decades of separation. The truth is that I remember very little from my childhood, only a few glints here and there like fireflies in a dark valley. So I kind of value the remaining memories. My family may disagree, but I will happily promise not to play this song for them on a cheap xylophone ever again. ^_^

Hyouka OP 2 metaphor

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Do girls think it is fun to drag boys into their human world?

Another masterpiece by Kyoto Animation is the 22-episodes animated TV series Hyouka. These guys really know quality, but that is not my sermon today. Rather, if you’re not busy with work or some such, I would like you to watch the animation to the opening song for the second half of the series. The dream of the main character sums up the whole 22 episodes pretty well, but in a purely metaphorical way. In the series, the boy starts out with the attitude to conserve his energy, emotionally even more than physically. He does not want a “rose-colored” high school life, but a colorless one. What I would call detached. His motto is: “If it is not necessary, don’t do it. If you must do it, be brief.”

Over the course of the series, he slowly changes, and it is due to his three friends in the classics club, mainly the girl we see at the end of the animation here. Watch, preferably full screen. There will be a quiz. ^_^ No, but there will be an autobiography.

Hyouka OP 2 – YouTube.

Did you watch that? Clearly the message of the clip is that even if you think people are your friends, they will just have fun with you when you don’t watch out. *_*

The message of the dream sequence however, that is what I am talking about. As he falls asleep, the boy feels that he is drowning. When he reappears, he has become something like a ghost: He is seen only in sketchy drawings and as reflections in shiny surfaces. Time passes: We see the snow of winter and then spring or summer, indicating a very long duration in which he aimlessly watches the world from outside, noticed by no one. Finally he appears in the glass of the high school club room, where his childhood friend recognizes him and the girl with the bright purple eyes reaches through the glass and pulls him back into the world of the living.

This is entirely metaphorical. The anime is not a supernatural story in the least, although I am kind of itching now to write such a story. But it is his detachment from the hectic world of humans with their wishes and wants and  desires, their plans and their goals. He watches that world pass by as if from a slightly different world, in which he has no needs for anything from the human world, only a mild curiosity from time to time as he wanders alone in a world no one else can see. And then someone notices him, and a girl reaches into the world where he was alone, and pulls him into the human world.

Been there, as extremely long-time readers will remember. Girls are mysterious creatures with uncanny powers like that. It may even feel like a good thing for a little while there. But in the end, you know you can’t really trust humans. It’s good to be back here in the phantom zone, where there is nothing I need in the human world. ^_^ I feel sometimes like it was a near miss. But probably not really.

Norwegian economy: Secret inflation

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Apartment buildings are cropping up in areas where there used to be single-family homes with apple gardens. But even these are not many enough or arriving fast enough.

For most Europeans, Norway must seem like a (slightly chilly) paradise these days. While “austerity” is the new trend elsewhere, Norway has returned to its continual boom after a short break during the financial crisis, a break mainly caused by European banks refusing to give credit to our trading partners. Norway today has almost no unemployment and in fact a chronic shortage of some types of workers. Guest workers from Europe have the option to immigrate, and many are taking it. Of course, we are a high-tech country and we don’t really need loafers. Our productivity is very high, and those who can’t keep up are not going to stay employed for long. Even public sector jobs are gradually becoming like that.

That said, wages and salaries are rising for almost everyone, although of course not equally. So it may seem like a paradise. Income is rising and there is almost no inflation! Well, about that…

What with all the people moving here, there simply aren’t enough houses for everyone to live the way they want. People who would prefer to live in a large house, live in a smaller house. People who would prefer to live in a small house, live in an apartment. People who would prefer to own, are renting. Now you may say: “This is how it always is. Desire always exceeds opportunity.” True! But the thing is, housing is getting expensive at a rapid pace. And since all need to live somewhere, it is actually inflation. It is just not evenly distributed. Those who already own a home, don’t notice it except in taxes, and only moderately even then. But the moment they want to upgrade to a larger home, they will find that these are rather more expensive than they used to be. So although they are theoretically growing richer at a rapid pace, they are actually not able to upgrade as they normally would. So: Inflation, but nobody must know it.

Of course, it gets pretty obvious for us who rent. Looking for other apartments without night parties upstairs, I can’t help but notice that the prices are rising steadily, by about 15% a year. Given how large a part rent is of monthly expenses, it is a pretty hefty inflation. If your taxes were rising like that, you’d vote for a different government next time. But due to the camouflage inherent in home ownership, people are actually happy with this inflation. They forget that they don’t really have the option, to sell their home and spend the money. Sure, they can borrow more money against it for each year, if they so desire. But borrowing has never, in itself, made anyone richer. If they invest that money wisely, perhaps. Do you know anyone who does that?

If this seems vaguely familiar, it may be because I warned Americans when they were making the same mistakes we are making now. Even though Norwegians have had the opportunity to point and laugh at the stupid foreigners (both American and European), nobody wants to believe that we have a problem here. It is different with us. “It is typically Norwegian to be good.” (Actual quote by a former Norwegian Prime Minister, although opinions are divided as to whether there was a hint of irony in it. It became a popular saying, anyway.)

Moving to Norway (if you can work smart enough to be the most productive in the world with a short workday and long vacation) is still a good option, but you should not have high expectations about home ownership for the first years unless you have a job title that ends in “Executive Officer”.

Chuunibyou!

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“It is my fate to bear the burden of endless battle with the harbingers of darkness.” Rikka is a Very Important Person.

Japanese has a new word, since a year or two ago. (OK, perhaps it only reached the world a year or two ago.) “Chuunibyou” – Middle School Second Year Syndrome – is the dreadful condition where someone discovers their individuality and free will before they discover the difference between reality and fantasy. They may dress all in black, including nail polish and lipstick where appropriate (or even if not), and hand in self-written poetry about death instead of their regular English essay. Or they may wear colored contacts and claim to have supernatural powers. They may declare their undying love for an anime character, complete with elaborate plans for the wedding. They may join some unconventional religion and try to convert everyone around them. Usually they get over it, and look back with considerable embarrassment on their actions.

The anime Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai – falling in love despite teenage delusions – is a romantic comedy without excessive display of panties and such. The main character is a high school freshman who is going to a high school a distance from home to avoid being recognized, because he spent his middle school years claiming to be the superhero Dark Flame Master, something that embarrasses him no end. But no sooner has his normal life begun, than he meets a girl in his class who wears an eye patch and a bandage on her arm to seal the supernatural powers inside her. And she knows his secret. Hilarity ensues, but despite all the awkwardness, they eventually become very close.

The anime – loosely based on a light novel with the same name – is warmly recommended for those who want a VERY Japanese love comedy without the usual pantsu glimpsing. There is some drama, but it is nothing that should scare large children. And the crazy antics and imaginary battles are wonderfully animated.

***

Naturally I find it interesting in terms of my own writing as well, since I like to write Young Adult novels, which for some reason is rarely about young adults but about middle and high schoolers. My attempt this year – which still badly needs a rewrite – stars a freshman in high school who takes anime way too seriously, joins a foreign religion, and believes that he is channeling the spirit of a Go player who died over 300 years ago. While I don’t go so far as to say he is deluded, I do have a side character present an alternative and more psychological explanation.

In contrast, my next story features a girl who everyone thinks is delusional or just trying to sound important, but who really spends every night in a magic world. The story is told by her cousin once removed, who comes to live with her and her mother (his real cousin) because there is no high school anywhere near the island where he grew up. The boy thinks the girl is crazy, especially when she starts reading from an invisible book. But then he starts dreaming about the same magic world…

***

One interpretation of the Jewish creation myth in Genesis is that humanity as a whole suffers from a kind of chuunibyou, having woken up to self-awareness at a point where we were still not ready for it. This seems to be the view favored by sci-fi writer and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, in his book about Perelandra (a mythical planet Venus where a new Adam and Eve are created in a tropical paradise.) In that book, the first humans reject the primordial temptation and grow up to their full human potential, which seems to be a kind of demigod. So in this view, the current humanity is in a kind of arrested development, stuck in a youthful delusion that we seem unable to shake off.

But now we’re getting pretty far afield for one entry. More another day. Or perhaps not. Every day is a special day at the Chaos Node.