Saturday 16 October 1999
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Pic of the day: Autumn leaves. This fall is not the most photogenic I have seen. The summer lingers on, and few leaves are willing to change into the autumn colors. ... Spent a couple hours this night coughing and hacking. Not my idea of great entertainment. On the bright side, I got time to write an e-mail to a friend, and look further on the strategy game of yesterday, "3rd millenium", and even read a little! And best of all, I survived. Again. I sure hope this is a trend. The survival, I mean. The coughing can go. As for the game, its documentation is pathetic. It comes with a tract, where there should have been a library. It is not all that intuitive. Today, for instance, I tried to play a small west-African state which has no production of ore itself. There is an economics screen that shows the groups of goods that are exported and imported, but there was no obvious way to initiate import of for instance ore. I just started a few projects anyway, so I'll see if the artificial intelligence arranges the trade details. This will not become evident at once, since one year of gametime seems to be ca 3-4 hours of real time, if this past night is any measure.The game is not recommended for the novice gamer. But I have daydreamed off and on for years of a game where I could take over a minor nation and build it up. It would be sort of ungrateful not to try now, don't you think? ... While running the simulator in the background, I've been writing a couple short chapter of a new novel. As the regular reader will know, I never finish novels. So the value of it is rather limited. Still, I felt like trying my hand at novelism again! This one is tentatively called "Thaumaturge", which means a worker of wonders or miracles. It is however not portraying a religious milieu, it is more on the borderline between fantasy and science fiction. The main character is not given a point of view in the story so far, and I think I shall keep it like that. What we see is mainly different people's reaction to the thaumaturge. This is something that has fascinated me a lot. Of course, you may guess this from the fact that I have my own weight in superhero comic books. The duality of modern man is perhaps less between good and evil than between powerful and powerless. As the human race, we have transformed our planet, caused the largest mass extinction since the goodbye of the dinosaurs, and the lights from our cities can be seen from space. We may even hold the key to the destruction of all higher lifeforms (above insects or so). And yet each human being is weak and often finds himself powerless. This duality is eloquently expressed in Superman and his civilian identity Clark Kent.If we look at our religions, things are less clear. Jesus should be an ideal study, being both God and man according to most christian doctrines. However, he seemed less torn between his humanity and divinity and more occupied on the axis of good vs evil. With a rather extended definition of evil, too. Of course, being God is as much a question of morality as of power. God is supposed to be the ultimate Good Guy, whereas experience elsewhere indicates that power corrupts. This makes it rather more important to focus on the ethical side of godhood than on the power. ... Did you know that your writing is like a fingerprint? It may be more or less obvious to the reader, but a computer looks at it differently. The computer will focus on things that are not conscious to the writer nor the reader: The length of sentences, the length of words and the width of the vocabulary. Active vs passive, preference for verb tenses and conjugations. Stuff like that. We tell a lot about ourselves without even thinking about it. A funny thing is that this profile changes somewhat when we write in a different language. I have a different writer profile in English than in Norwegian, for instance. But this is not an error, really. American experiments have shown that the language difference goes deep into the soul. A group of bilingual (Spanish/English) students were given some personality tests. They were randomly given either an English or Spanish version, with the same questions. But the answers differed: Those who had the English version, came across as more independent and materialist, while those who got the Spanish version seemed to be more centered on tradition and family. I do not doubt that I myself come across as a somewhat different person in English than I would have done in Norwegian. I even think the two different Norwegian languages encourage different ways of thinking.There's a lot more to say about these things; but if you are interested, you probably know it already. Now to post this, then jump over to Perforated Lines to see if there are any uncanny coincidences today. |