Tuesday 19 October 1999
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Pic of the day: Part of a screenshot from the game 3rd Millenium. Not too shabby graphics, shame about the documentation. ... Rebooting Unreality I've been writing fiction since my early childhood, mostly for my own amusement. If I want to read a particular story and nobody else seem to have written it, I do it myself. Money is not into it, and hardly fame either, or I would have persevered to have it published. (At least if I had the faintest idea of how to persevere ...) Now there is one thing that I have tried to avoid in writing: Autobiography. I know that if any fiction I have written is ever read, during my life or later, people will automatically assume that the characters there are me and people close to me. And reasonably so. I enjoy reading Al Schroeder's Decajour free online fiction anthology. Yet as a regular reader of his online journal too, I can't help think that some of the more sympathetic characters have more than their fair share of Al and his wife Barb. I would not be shocked to find that people were viewing my own fiction similarly.I've softened slightly again in later years. But still, I want to go deeper, to drill through the layers of personal subconscious, way into the deep of the collective subconscious, down to where dreams fade and myths begin. This is easier with dedicated fantasy fiction. To do so is much harder when the fiction is set in our own world. I am not sure I am up to that task. Yet it should be possible in a mixed setting like "Thaumaturge". So I've rebooted my latest literary attempt from word 1. Some persons seem to be lost - perhaps they thought about authors during the reboot? The mainest of main characters remain, though not unchanged. Thaumaturge has changed his civilian name to Marc and is now in his thirties. Annie-Ma is 28 and while she still lives in California, she is now a disillusioned paleontologist. A natural Nordic Blonde with Big Bouncy B&B (T&A for the younger readers who don't remember BB), her looks nullify whatever scientific credibility her razor-sharp intelligence may contribute to her career. Gone are Vesla and the sibling rivalry. Gone are Nina the Californian flatmate and the rather explicit dominance/ submission fantasies. Comic book references have shifted focus from Marvel to DC. ... The story is still embryonic, but at least it's not dead. Neither am I, praise Good Old Deity. I slept a ways into the morning, then was sick a little while and went to work. I didn't even have time to make an addendum to the yesterdiary, which must look pretty strange as is. Coming home, I ate yoghurt and drank red soda and slept in front of my computer until fairly late in the evening. My mouth and throat are both feeling better now! The computer is still running that awfully slow strategy game, 3rd Millenium. At the current speed, playing through all 500 years would take ca half a year of continuous running on the computer. I am starting to understand why it was sold so cheap, and why nobody in the strategy games newsgroup admitted to knowing about it. Gaah. Yet, it does have the appeal of being new to me. There are probably things that I will get to see if I just keep it running. It could run in the night or while I'm at work. Needless to say, I've "rebooted" the game to try to run several different scenarios. Right now I'm trying my hand at the CIS. The surplus of scientists and technicians is nicely realistic. It sure beat the west African state where there was no electricity available to build a power plant. Duh. That's where the IMF and the World Bank should come in and say, we'll fix this if you make the people hungry and desperate enough to work virtually for free...A not so realistic part of the game is that the Nordic countries are treated more or less as developing countries, for instance the telecoms networks are pathetic. In real life (and this game is supposed to start in 2001) the Nordic countries are on a par with the USA in wired telecommunications, and ahead in wireless. It is the southern parts (which is almost all) of the European Union that is lagging seriously behind. That's OK by me, of course. I spit on your pathetic union and your pathetic beer and your pathetic attempt to seduce Norwegian girls... Oops, got a bit carried away there.While writing this entry, the text editor started to skip letters, so I had to save and exit 3rd Millenium. Even so, it did not release the memory cleanly, so I had to - you guessed it - reboot the computer. I love it when the universe is reading over my shoulder as I type my diary... |
Fiction-writing music of the day: "Just like Heaven", by The Cure. |