Thursday 28 July 2005

Pic of the day: Screenshot from the cute and innocent anime Bottle Fairy.

Postponed again

I've been working on a small article on the revaluation of the yuan (the Chinese currency). Actually if you have read and understood my earlier articles on global economy, this one should not be necessary. But that's a lot to expect of the casual reader. So I intend to complete it anyway. Of course, you could also read financial magazines, but they are written for the rich and powerful. I don't write for them and we have a mutual disrespect.

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I should read up on this Walter Truett Anderson. It seems he has been thinking some things similar to me. Well, at least two things, which is more than most, sadly. One: Multiple facets of personality is growing common and is to be welcomed. Two: A revolution of the mind is coming, or rather a very rapid evolution. But it is not coming quite yet. The evolution is happening, but the dramatic change is still a bit ahead.

I think both of these are true, even if the guy is labeled a post-modernist and therefore is inherently dubious. The new "dividuality" comes from a position of strength: We develop new personalities not because the core personality is too weak to hold our aspects together, but because we simply have so much content, it won't fit in one traditional personality. The new multi-aspect person does not suffer from random changes of personality, but instead deploys the different aspects consciously in situations where they fit. Example: Role playing games. A boy who roleplays a female wood elf in Morrowind or Everquest does not wake up the next day and thinks he is a woman, no more than he wakes up thinking that he has long ears and magic powers.

As for the sea change in the human soul, I wish I could live to see it happen on a grand scale. But I almost certainly won't. I may still live decades instead of months, for all I know. But I am not sure a few decades is enough. Oh, in a few decades there will be some awesome changes, no doubt. But I talk of more than just deploying some great inventions. I talk of a total overhaul of what it means to be human. The feedback so far indicates that it's not exactly around the bend.

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I should also try to make a list of the entries of various colors, or even subtypes like economy or politics, or individual games. Stuff like that. But frankly, that's quite some work and I don't know if anyone misses it. Perhaps most people who read my site at all do so after a Google hit. There are probably not many - if any - who hang around using it as some kind of reference work!