World of Ruin: SanTiMA

Back to the World of Ruin.  The Default starting location for player characters is the San Diego Tijuana Metropolitan Axis, or SanTiMA.  As the name would suggest, it is located on the sites of the current cities of San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico, as well as points in between.  I like the idea of national borders being less significant in the World of Ruin, as the cities have lost contact with their old central governments, and these two cities are pretty connected to each other even today.  If you take out the hassle of border crossings it gets even better.

SanTiMA is, if not the "Good guy" city-state, at least much more adventurer-friendly than Angel City.  While there is obviously a city government (two, actually, San Diego and Tijuana are still technically independant, though closely allied) they have little influence on peoples' lives outside of basic law-and-order.  Most goods and services are provided by competing companies, and there are many, many of these.  Even the largest are tiny by today's standards (can't have multi-national coporations in a world where international transportation and communication is disrupted by magic and monsters), but they are big enough to be the real local power.  The larger corps have their own small private armies that mostly guard their facilities (and, in some cases, provide security to those who pay for it) but cooperate under business deals and governmental oversight in times of war.  Still, SanTiMA has less military power than Angel City, and would likely have been conquered by their northern neighbors were it not for the Dead Zone between them.

Another benefit that SanTiMA has going for it is that it is more open (or at least, more pragmatic) toward magic and non-humans.  Basically, anything that works for a corp or for SanTiMA as a whole is allowed, and their magical and alchemical research is far in advance of the more intolerant Angel City.  In fact, some of the biggest corps are magicorps.  This is also useful for PCs.  They won't be arrested or lynched just because they have pointy ears or cast spells.

Of course, SanTiMA is not a lawless anarchy--although guns and fireballs are legal, they can't be used openly in most places (in the nicer neighborhoods, even carrying a weapon is banned, unless locked in a transport container or the like).  Still, adventurers are accepted well enough, so long as they confine their adventuring to the Dead Zone (or to the rougher parts of town, where the police and corp security don't go).

Culturally, SanTiMA is a blend of US and Mexico, as befits its origins.  English and Spanish are both official languages, and most people speak both, though many favor one or the other.  Tijuana remains the poorer end of the Axis, though there are rich neighborhoods there, and poor ones in San Diego.  Most people live in very dense urban neighborhoods full of multi-story, multi-use buildings.  There are even a couple of true arcologies, one just east of downtown San Diego, and one at the old US/Mexican border.  In addition, there's a small military "mini-arcology," Fort Coronado, on the site of the old Navy base at the north end of Coronado Island.  This houses SanTiMA's only true governmental military, and mostly defends the city-state from oceanborne dangers.

Some of the most adventurer-friendly (and consequentially roughest) areas are to the north of San Diego proper.  The city-state's influence reaches up to about Solana Beach along the coast.  North of this, the Dead Zone begins, though it doesn't get really bad until somewhere around northern Carlsbad, or Oceanside.  The only people who go that far north are the Zoneraiders.  These brave (or foolhardy) souls dare to go into the Zone itself, in search of whatever magical or extradimensional resources they happen to find.  They are also the default PCs in this setting.

Gunnerkrigg Court

I just discovered this really cool webcomic called Gunnerkrigg Court.  It's kind of hard to describe, but it's got elements of Harry Potter but with more steampunk and other science-technology stuff, and a main character who embodies the GURPS Advantage of Unfazeable.  I love Science Fantasy crossover settings, and this is very much in that vein.  The first chapter involves a girl getting rid of a shadow-spirit being (or whatever, I'm not yet sure what it is) with the aid of a robot built out of spare parts.  That's my sort of webcomic.

Anathem of the Heart and Anathem of the Mind

Wow, that was a good book. I'm speaking of Anathem, the book I mentioned in my last post. I'm a Neal Stephenson fan, so I knew I was going to be reading this book anyhow, but it was even better than I had expected.

WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!

I think this is the first openly and explicitly science fiction novel I've read in quite a while. I don't know...it seems like SF is on the way out, and then I read a book like this. It's got classic SF tropes like a spaceships (including one of the best hard-SF generation ships I've encountered, the Daban Urnud) and other worlds. Moreover, it takes scientific ideas, such as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and builds a good story around them. Very well done in that respect. And it even has a satisfying ending, though enough loose ends remain to make me hungry for more of this.

And it left a lot of room for speculation. We got just a glimpse at Urnud's version of the mathic tradition (and of course heaps of detail on Arbre's). It makes me wonder if "Laterre" has its equivalent. More specifically, it makes me wonder if this is, in fact, the Society Eruditorum, and if the Laterran versions of Fraa Jad and his ilk are none other than Enoch Root and the others who would be considered Wise. In addition, I wonder at the connections, if any, between newmatter and the alternate chemical elements of the various alternate worlds, and the Solomonic Gold. In short, I wonder if there is any connection between this novel and Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle.

There were certainly lots of references to other Stephenson novels. Yes, even The Big U, with the nuclear waste hidden beneath the millenial maths. The descriptions of how the Bolt, Chord, and Sphere worked also reminded me of the various nanogizmos from Diamond Age.

Anyhow, I am very pleased with how this book worked for me. It gave me a lot to think about, which I always consider a good thing.

Anathem

No, that's not a misspelling. I picked up the latest novel by Neal Stephenson recently, and am in the midst of reading it. I'm not far enough along to properly review it but I must say I love it so far. The last few books he read were all historical tales, and were set in the real world, so he didn't get to exercise the world-building skills he did in earlier stories like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, which were set in the future. Anathem is set in...well...I don't know yet if it's a parallel universe, an alien planet, or what, but it's not Earth. Despite this, it is just enough earthlike to be comprehensible, yet tantalizingly different. In some ways, it reminds me of the feeling I got when I watched Wings of Honneamise for the first time. I felt like I was exploring a world that was not mine, but was nonetheless a real place.

Hopefully I'll have more to say when I finish the book.

Theocracy

I had a conversation with a friend the other night, in which the topic of theocracy came up, in particular, as it applies to a potential future system of government for the US (or some other country, but we were talking about this one in particular). I kept thinking about that last night, and I came to the conclusion that I can't really support establishing a theocratic government here in the US.

This is despite the fact that I'm a Christian and a) believe in God, and b) believe that God is basically a good and benevolent being. Certainly, then, it should make sense that putting God in charge of running the country can only be a good thing. After all, God is better able to see the "big picture" and make decisions based on how things truly are, rather than being limited by personal perception and prejudice, as human beings are. The Bible is full of passages describing Him in terms appropriate for a great ruler or leader, so why not put Him in charge of the country?

And I can't really argue with that. If God's name was on the ballot (for any office, not just President) He'd have my vote hands-down. Problem is, He's not on the ballot (as far as I've seen at any rate). And, I doubt He'd step into the oval office even if we wrote His name in.

Which leaves us with the closest alternative--electing some human representative to stand in for God, to rule as He would rule and to speak His words to the people to be their laws. Such a person would be a sort of living conduit for divine will, much as the prophets were in the Old Testament. The OT is full of God talking in the first person, through the prophets, who were talking as if they were God, though they weren't. Rather, it was God speaking through them. I can envision something like this working as well. The problem here comes in finding someone who is a completely reliable prophet of God, and not either a) a false prophet who speaks his own words as if they were God's, but instead serves some other power (such as a false god, himself, or some conspiratorial organization) or b) a genuine prophet who is still a mere human with his own failings, who will sometimes fail to properly channel God's words for reasons similar to those given above.

This brings us to a third alternative, which is probably the closest to what comes to mind when one hears of a theocracy. That is, a person or person who rules in the name of God, and who probably claims divinely-granted authority, but who does not claim to BE God, or to speak directly for God. Priests, rather than prophets.

The Old Testament had its priests, of course. So did the New Testament--and they were often the ones whom Jesus was slamming hardest. So it isn't entirely sure that a priest-ocracy is what we need either. In general, Theocracy generally turns into Me-ocracy, where Me is typically the person proposing the theocracy (i.e. "Why don't you just put me in charge--I'll get things back to the way God wants them!").

So we have to be wary of leaders claiming to be/speak for/rule by God. But what about God's laws? The OT's full of them--people who set out to read the Bible from cover to cover often don't make it past that point in Exodus where was had been a rousing adventure story full of armies clashing and waters parting and strange Fortean meteorological phenomena descends into something more akin to a legal text. The laws of Moses are pretty extensive, and parts are surprisingly modern to readers such as myself (I was intrigued to note that the Bible distinguishes between degrees of homicide, for instance).

Still, Jesus died to set us free from "The Law" which seems to imply at least some subset of the Mosaic Law. Certainly the dietary laws are mentioned explicitly in the NT as not being binding anymore. On the other hand, there are parts of the law that we like, such as that old favorite "Thou Shalt Not Kill." I don't want to be killed, and I'll bet you don't either, so we want to hang onto that law. We don't want Jesus's death to separate us from that one.

The thing is, even if that law is no longer binding on us, that doesn't mean we should go around wantonly murdering people. If I don't kill people, it's not necessarily because the Ten Commandments contain "Thou Shalt Not Kill." It could be because there's nobody I really want to kill--because I personally consider killing so unpleasant and distasteful that it would take a lot to make me do it. It could also be because a totally separate set of laws (the ones that happen to govern the land in which I live) also contain homicide laws that differ from those given in the Bible (perhaps postulating more degrees, and stipulating different sets of punishments) but still are generally along the "Don't do it" vein.

There are a lot of laws in the modern world that have nothing to do with morality. We don't really think the Brits are going to Hell because they drive on the left side of the road--but if one of them comes over here and decides to go for a drive, he'd better stay on the right side instead. I call these laws "Protocols" in the sense of networking protocols. When you're writing network software that's meant to interact with pre-existing hardware and software, you have to follow certain rules in order to ensure that the other machines can make sense of the data you send, and you can make sense of that which you receive. Network protocols ensure the smooth functioning of the network, and protocol laws ensure the smooth functioning of society.

Even the murder laws can be seen this way. Killing people is bad because murder is morally wrong, but it is a crime because it disrupts the smooth functioning of society. Morality does not necessarily enter into the picture (though there's often a lot of overlap). The New Testament talks a lot about love--God's love for us, and our love for God and for each other. To me, this is the source of true morality, not the law of Moses and certainly not the laws of the State of California. But you can't legislate love. You can't put a gun to someone's head and say "You WILL love your fellow man or I will blow your effin' brains out!" Or rather, you CAN, and I have heard proposals from some who favor theocracy that amount to basically this. Or worse, something like "You will believe the things I believe or I will blow your effin' brains out!" Romans 10:9 states "If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved." You can make someone confess at gunpoint, but you can't make him believe. Force, and thus law (which is backed by force or threat of force) cannot truly convert and cannot truly save. It can only make people act in a semblance of salvation.

But is this enough to be worth the threat of this kind of coercion being misapplied? The current US constitution is incompatible with Mosaic law (which IS law and CAN be applied through force, unlike love and belief). Applying a system of government like that specified in the laws of Moses would necessitate changing or removing many parts of the constitution (which is perfectly possible, and explicitly allowed by the constitution itself--it's a meta-document meant to be changed as needed). However, I personally don't believe that the benefits to be gained by doing this are worth the cost. I think that one of the reasons why Christianity has thrived so well in this country is because there is no official religion. People are free to believe whatever they want. There are countries in Europe where everyone's automatically Lutheran (or whatever) unless they state otherwise, which has resulted in a lot of apathetic, non-practicing Lutherans. Here, you're a Lutheran (or a Baptist, or a Methodist, or whatever) because you choose to, or because you were raised that way and have chosen not to rebel, not because the government says you are. If everyone were forced to at least behave like Christians should, to me that would negate the whole significance of a person behaving like a Christian because he IS one. The law of Moses is not the only legal system that can ensure a smoothly functioning society, and it's certainly not the only one under which Christianity can thrive and grow.

So what do I propose? Keep things basically the way they are, in terms of religion's role in life. A person's faith is a deeply personal thing, not something that can be spread at gunpoint, at least not without perverting it and turning good spiritual food into poison. I'm a Christian, and would prefer it if everyone else were too, but I also believe in freedom of religion. I'd rather you were a Christian, but if you want to worship Cthulhu instead, you're free to do so. If you ever get tired of squid-gods and want a more loving (and lovable) deity to worship, I'll be here for you, ready to tell you the good news of Jesus Christ. But if you choose to worship Cthulhu instead, I'll not stop you with violence or threats thereof, unless you take some action to interfere with the functioning of society (i.e. violate the protocols that we happen to be living under now). So no human sacrifices, for instance, because that's not allowed, because it prevents the victim from functioning in society (due to being dead). But aside from that, your faith is your business, and that's the way it should be here in the US.

Poser

I attended SigGraph last month, just a one-day, exhibit-hall-only visit, but it was the first time I'd been to one in years.  While there, I picked up a copy of Poser 7 from the Smith Micro booth.  I've been trying to draw characters in somewhat more interesting poses than just "standing there looking cool," and I'd been wanting to pick up a pose reference book.  I figured that Poser would do the job for me, and be more versatile since I could create any pose I wanted, and view it from any angle.

And it's been all that, though I haven't been drawing much lately for other reasons.  Thing is, when I bought it, they gave me a coupon code for a free 6 month passport on their web store, Content Paradise, along with a sampler CD-ROM of stuff available from there.  The stuff (including a fully posable M1-A1 Abrams tank) is cool enough I decide to give the site a shot.  I download the major freebee packages, including three male figures and one female.  Looking around at the stuff starts giving me ideas of characters, settings, and plots.  I find an anime-esque girl named Terai Yuki and a texture pack for her, and that suggests a character to me--a sort of female version of L or Near from Death Note (one of my favorite manga series) only instead of tracking down a killer notebook, they're looking for terrorists who are using supernatural means in their attacks.  There's a lot of spy and action/adventure stuff on the site--commando outfits, vehicles, guns, etc.

So, what started out as a universal pose reference thing for me has morphed into this addictive character-creation and visual story telling program.  I picked up a few scenery packs, including a really cool industrial area with pipes and factory-type buildings (I'm a sucker for industrial imagery)--just the sort of place for our heroes to infiltrate--or blow up.  I also got a stealth outfit for my infiltrator and blower-upper, who I've named Rydlie.  I've created some action poses, including a hanging-from-a-wall pose that I've been trying to draw (unsuccessfully) for a while.  This is a really fun program.

Thing is, my main character, the Terai Yuki variant that I've named Kiya (it's amazing how you can throw together clothing and texture options, maybe tweak face and body geometry a bit, and a character materializes, complete with name) only has one outfit.  The default Terai Yuki minidress totally fits the way I envision the character, but she really needs more variety.  I went through the Content Paradise clothes list looking for outfits, but I mostly just find morphs for existing outfits that don't seem to be present there.  I google a bit, and I discover that these are available for sale from a totally different website, called Renderosity.  Curious, I decide to poke around to see what they've got there--in particular if there's any outfits or accessories for the other characters I have.  

I find very few, but a whole lot of other characters listed that I saw products refer to on the Content Paradise site, but never actually found for sale there.  I just figured that they were older versions of the Poser men, women, and children, that they no longer bothered selling because they'd been replaced with newer, better ones.  There was a bit of content for these on CP, but not a lot.  Renderosity was chock full of such content, much of it very cool.  But these figures weren't for sale there either.

More googling turned up Daz3D as the makers of these figures.  And they had yet another web store, with these figures and more.  I knew there was a Poser community out there, but I had no idea it was this huge, with at least three large, well stocked web stores.  I'm wondering what I got myself into.

I also noticed some patterns to these stores.  Content Paradise obviously focuses on the e Frontier/Smith Micro figures and content for these, but seems to have more real-world stuff.  There are cop and firefighter outfits, office and factory scenes, business equipment like laptops and cell phones, and that sort of thing.  Also a lot of military vehicles, such as the Abrams tank I mentioned earlier.  This was suggesting some relatively realistic stories, albeit with some fantastic elements (and thus, the Death Note esque storyline).  Renderosity has more SF and fantasy stuff, including some really cool looking cyberpunk sets, and some very revealing fantasy outfits for the (Daz) women, which look like something out of Boris Vallejo (or in some cases, Masamune Shirow) painting.  And I like SF and fantasy too.  Now I don't know what to do!

The funny thing is, I find all of this appealing in more or less the same way I find RPGs appealing.  I don't play RPGs to fight, or to loot, or even to socialize (though I enjoy all of these) but mostly to create imaginary people in imaginary places.  I think the whole Poser thing is appealing because it lets me do the same sort of thing.

Sigh, now I've got one more drug in my life :)

The Dark Knight

WARNING -- Spoilers for the Batman movie, The Dark Knight

I finally got around to seeing the lastest Batman flick last night. I wasn't even aware that it was still in theaters, but it obviously was. Not only that, but the theater was packed! I'm used to seeing movies well after their premieres in nearly-empty theaters. This was not at all what I expected.

There was a good reason there were so many people watching the movie though. I agree with those who think that Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker deserves a posthumous Oscar. They finally found someone who can out-crazy Jack Nicholson, and he up and dies after making the movie.

A couple of things struck me about the movie. The first was how long it was! It was almost 3 hours long, and there were several points in the movie where it felt like it was nearing the end--the bad guys seemed to be defeated or nearly so, and the good guys started talking like movie characters do toward the climax of a film. Then something happens and the plot does a 180 and the audience is hauled up yet another lift hill for yet another roller coaster ride. The rhythm of the film was different from the norm for movies, and I think that made The Dark Knight more disturbing, as you really didn't know what would happen next.

The second thing was that Ledger's version of the Joker is now my reference for Chaotic Evil. I like to have characters that, to me, epitomize the various D&D alignments, as an aide to role-playing. Jack Shaftoe from the Baroque Cycle, for instance, is my iconic Chaotic Neutral character. The Joker is CE, caring only about causing destruction, mayhem, and suffering. It's notable that, unlike the first Batman movie, they didn't give the Joker an origin story. He wasn't a crook who got dumped in chemicals that gave him a clown face and a taste for joke-themed crime. The Joker himself was fond of telling stories of his past, but they were all contradictory, and in the end we don't know who he was or what he was--he remains an enigma.

The third thing was that Batman is NOT the "World's Greatest Detective," at least not in this continuity, as he constantly fell for the Joker's tricks. The REAL World's Greatest Detectives (actually the world's THREE greatest detectives in one) would have seen through the deception as he saw through Light's more subtle trickery. Or maybe I'm just an L fan :)

I was thinking of Death Note at a few points during the film. I was curious just what a person with Shinigami eyes would see when he looked at the Joker. Did he really have a real name? Fiction is full of nameless heroes and villains, but is it possible for a person to be truly nameless?

And yes, I managed to turn a blog post about at Batman movie into pointless Death Note speculation. Oh well, I guess I just like Death Note.

But...I also liked The Dark Knight! If you haven't seen it, and you like tense, psychological, yet still action-packed movies (or you like Batman), go see it while it's still in theaters!

World of Ruin - Angel City

OK, every good campaign world needs a "starting area," which is given more detail, and which can be expanded as needed as the PCs venture further afield. By default, I'm making this starting area be southern California. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, it's where I live, so I have a good idea what the geography is like.

Second of all, it's an interesting place, even if you take away the social aspects--it's got mountains, ocean, deserts, hills, and so on. I've also lived much of my life in central Ohio, but that's not as physically interesting--it's mostly flat or nearly flat, and you can pretty much go anywhere you want to if you're not concerned with things like private property. The geography of SoCal lets me more easily define physical limits and barriers, and say things like "These monsters live on THIS side of these mountains," and "troops from THIS valley rarely go to THIS OTHER valley."

Third, it's almost got a World of Ruin flavor to it as is. Ohio's cities blur into the countryside. You might be driving along a busy street lined with strip malls and fast food joints, and as you go along, those businesses are slowly replaced by homes, and the homes by farms, and the farms by forests until you finally realize you're in the boonies. Here where I live now the cities are cut out from the wilderness almost with a laser beam. I've walked through residential neighborhoods where the last row of houses borders scrubland that looks like it hasn't been changed since before the Spanish discovered the place. Yet, on the other side of that divide are new, modern homes with lawns and swimming pools. In short, it's got that "Civilization-bordering-on-raw-wilderness" feel that I want.

In the World of Ruin, there are two main centers of civilization in the area, corresponding to the modern cities of Los Angeles and San Diego. In the place of the former, there's the similarly-named "Angel City." They're my default "local bad guys." Despite the angelic motif of much of their military technology, they're far from heavenly. They're your typical high-tech fascist police state. If you're familiar with the Coalition from Rifts, imagine those guys with a fixation on angelic imagery (feathered wings, halos, etc.) rather than skulls. That said, they are a force for civilization, and they are able to keep their territory mostly safe from monsters, though people who don't back the current government wholeheartedly are probably a lot less safe than they'd be out in the wilds. They're a force for civilization, but probably not the type of civilization that player characters typically favor.

Despite the obviously religous nature of angels, I don't really want Angel City to be a fundamentalist theocracy--that would be too obvious. Instead, they're run by a military government advised (and some people would say, controlled) by a group of four AIs. These AIs occupy heavily fortified structures, called "Citadels" which are located around the central arcology structure of Angel City itself, and are responsible for much of the actual policies of the city-state. The AIs are named Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, and Uriel, and collectively referred to as the Archangels. These squabble amongst themselves, but generally present a unified front to outside threats.

Downtown LA is completely covered over by a massive arcology tower, nearly as well fortified as the Citadels that protect it. The majority of the population lives in here. Life for a typical citizen is, above all else, safe. There is constant security, protecting the people from crime and accidents, but also from dangerous thought and hurtful speech (where "Dangerous" and "Hurtful" are defined by the government, of course). Most people don't mind this, and go about their daily lives working (at government-supported jobs) and playing (government approved games and sports). The military occupies the highest stratum of human society here, with officially-supported businesses (nominally independant, but in fact subject to significant oversight) directly beneath them.

Other, smaller satellite arcologies are located elsewhere in the greater LA area. These are generally owned by large businesses, and dedicated to housing their workers. People here generally have a bit more freedom of thought and expression (at least, as long as there are no Angel City forces "visiting" at the time), but also lack the protection that those forces provide. Crime and corruption are common, and workers are often exploited by their employers.

Surrounding these arcologies are the "exurbs" -- the remains of the old cityscape from the pre-arcology days. Services of any sort are spotty here--many areas lack electricity, running water, or adequete sanitation. The people who live here are both a resource to be used by the government and corporations, and a constant thorn in their side. It is difficult to adequately police such an area, and violent crime is ubiquitous, but this lack of policing also makes the exurbs a hotbed for revolutionary activity. To help combat this, the Angel City authority offer money and other rewards for turning in subversive elements. This means that betrayal and treachery are a constant concern here, with everyone trying to stab each other in the back for a few handouts--which is exactly how the authorities like it.

In what would be present day Orange County, the influence of Angel City decreases as you head further south. South Orange County and adjacent parts of San Diego County are home to the mysterious and dangerous "Dead Zone." I'll cover that in a later post.

Real World Weirdness - The Tribe that Doesn't Count

No, I don't mean that they're unimportant. I literally mean they don't do the whole 1-2-3 business. An aside on a web forum post I was reading introduced me to the Pirahã (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people). They're a tribe of hunter/gatherers in the Amazon, who'd probably be much like any other such tribe (there are a lot, though fewer than in the past) except that they seem to eschew pretty much all forms of abstract thought. Not that they're stupid--they're great at concrete stuff like day-to-day survival. But they have no religion, no fiction, and no mythology, at least as far as researchers have been able to determine. Their language is one of the simplest known, and seems to lack recursion--you can't embed one sentence into another like you can in english and every other known language. And they can't count. Their language has no numbers, of course, but other languages also lack these, and speakers of those languages have no trouble counting. They borrow number-words from other languages if they have to, but they can count just fine using those borrowed words. These guys seem to be unable to learn to count, or at least unwilling to.

Now I don't know why this is, or even if it's really the case or if these guys are just putting on an act to fool those weird pale people who have nothing better to do than to ask random rain forest tribespeople about their personal beliefs. Still, the idea is intriguing, and it suggests a whole range of fictional scenarios based on this concept.

• First of all, this is a good example of "alien" thought patterns (albeit in humans). Perhaps a race of non-humans is completely incapable of abstract though, while still being intelligent. They might be somewhat like this. I am reminded of the Garuda in Perdido Street Station, who, while very different from the Pirahã, are nonetheless very concrete thinkers. A Garuda criminal refers to himself as being "Too Abstract."
• One article I read mentioned that only men had been interviewed. Perhaps in a fictional culture the women do all the abstract thought, and for all we know are accomplished mathematicians and theologians.
• An article mentioned that the children are largely raised by other children, not by their parents, and have a sort of subculture of their own. Maybe the kids are the philosophers of a culture, and become more focused on daily life when they reach adulthood. There could even be a rite (possibly involving magic) whereby they formally give up their childish thought patterns and devote the rest of their lives to living in the moment. This reminds me of an alien species I read about in a SF novel ages ago, which had a life cycle similar to that of butterflies. The larvae were sapient, and had developed space travel, while the adult forms were largely mindless and devoted only to reproduction.
• The Pirahã apparently only cat-nap, and don't sleep for long periods at a time. Why is this? I can understand the need to not be unconscious for hours on end in a dangerous environment like the jungle, but their neighbors manage to get by just fine sleeping at night like we do. Perhaps there's a connection. I don't know if anyone's done research on what this type of sleep pattern does to peoples' thought patterns.
• Despite not believing in gods, they do believe in spirits of a sort, all of which are actual physical objects. They also believe that these spirits can possess them in some way and change them at a fundamental level. As a result of these changes, they often change their names. This makes me think of a novel called "Vaccuum Flowers" in which it was common to "reprogram" people with different skill sets and even personalities. When the police raided a place, they would reprogram some of the people they caught into more cops, for instance. Or, imagine a world in which aliens were taking over some segment of the population, sometimes switching hosts. These aliens would have different ways of viewing the world than humans do, and might act somewhat like the Pirahã.

The real world is, most likely, not this strange. The most reasonable explanation I encountered is that the Pirahã were as they were for cultural reasons, and felt that their way of life was superior to that of outsiders, and refused to change for that reason.

Still, it's things like this that give ideas to fiction writers. I hope that I'll continue to find real-world wierdness and it'll be come a recurring feature of this blog. I will share my ideas with others, for their benefit and my own.

World of Ruin

I've been toying around with an RPG setting for a while now. It is meant for use with the GURPS rules, my favorite RPG system, and is a sort of post-post-apocalyptic cross-genre world. It's meant to be a setting for somewhat traditional "adventuring" with lots of weird powers and toys and plenty of fights with strange creatures, and a healthy amount of exploring and discovery. I've been writing up individual elements--character templates, martial arts, and such, but nothing on the setting as a whole. I decided to use this blog to jot down some ideas on larger-scale elements.

• The setting is tentatively called "World of Ruin." It is set on Earth in the medium future, maybe 100 or so years from now, though I've not settled on a specific time frame.
• Most of the world is uninhabited, or sparsely inhabited. There are "barbarian" tribes with primitive technology and primitive magic but lots of survival skills, and plenty of howling, monster-filled wilderness. All of this is dotted with the ruins of past settlements and installations, both modern and futuristic, though all in a state of serious decay.
• Civilization has never truly fallen, but it has receded. Most of the population lives in large, fortified arcologies, or in nearly-as-fortified outlying communities. These outliers would be things like farming towns for crops that can't be grown well in the arcologies, or mining towns, or the like.
• Similarly, technology has continued to advance, in small spurts and leaps at least. Overall Tech Level is mature TL9 with superscience. The smaller and more remote settlements may have only TL7 or TL8, or even lower, and a lot of older tech is still in use, especially by the poorer folk. There are lots of toys, but in most of the world those toys are unavailable or expensive, and difficult to repair, so the PCs will still have situations where they have to rely on their own talents.
• The disaster which brought the world to this state wasn't anything traditional like nuclear war or ecological catastrophe. Rather, the laws of nature changed subtly, and the boundaries between worlds broke out. Magic returned to the world with a bang (actually, quite a lot of bangs) and with it creatures of legend--and nightmares.
• Magic and Psionics both exist in this setting. There are several different types of magic, ranging from standard RPG-style fireballs-and-lightning spell magic, through more subtle (and far-ranging) ritual magic, to primal control over reality itself.
• The civilized world consists of, to borrow a term from 4th Edition D&D, "Points of Light." These are mostly independant, high-tech and/or high-magic city states, separated by wilderness and possibly connected by tenuous lines of communication or transportation.
• Each of these city states is different from the rest. One might have the latest TL9 (or even early TL10) tech, but ban all forms of magic, while the next has only moderate tech but full use of spell-magic, and so on.
• There should be many, many options for player creation. Standbys like Elves and Dwarves are available to play, as well as exotics like cat-people, and high tech cyborgs and bioroids.
• The city states are (mostly) lawful places, with functioning societies and public services like police and firefighting--they are safe for law-abiding folk, and (usually) not oppressive police states. However, weapons ownership is common elsewhere, and the world beyond the immediate control of the city states is lawless and dangerous--great places for adventure are commonplace, and not too far from civilization should things get too bad.
• There is plenty of intrigue both within and between the city states, so there are opportunities for adventure even within civilization.
• Other worlds exist, and characters may be from them, or descended from beings from them, but Earth itself is the usual location for adventuring.

In short, the "World of Ruin" is meant to be a perfect place to play capable but not omni-powerful heroes who get into a wide range of adventures, and where almost anything is possible. One adventure might be a standard dungeon crawl, only with guns and robots as well as fireballs and elves, while the next might be a cyberpunk style mission to infiltrate a research facility in a city state.

I hope to add more ideas in future posts, but I think this is enough for now.

Death Note (Spoilers and Thoughts)

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE END OF DEATH NOTE!!!









OK, so I finished off my Death Note manga collection at Anime Expo last weekend, and read the whole thing in rather a marathon session (well, the whole thing except the parts I read in line at the convention). And, I have to say, I was completely satisfied with the ending--it was pretty much how I'd expected it to end, and pretty much how I hoped it would end.

Afterwards, I talked with one of my friends, who had also seen the end of Death Note (in his case, the anime rather than the manga, but I understand they're similar enough in that respect). He liked the ending, but was also a bit bummed that Light had to die. I was not only expecting this (Ryuk had promised as much from the very beginning) but was glad to see him go. Light annoyed the crap out of me from the very beginning--he was one of those guys who's good at pretty much everything and thinks he's better than everyone else. Exactly the sort who'd jump at a chance to make themselves gods. Throughout the manga, I was saying things like "L! You're right, Light IS Kira! No, don't believe what he's saying--it's just a trick!" and later I was saying similar things to Near. (No, I wasn't actually talking out loud--don't worry that I'm going crazy and literally talking to manga characters). I was really starting to fear that Light had got the better of Near, and that Kira would really prevail.

I was horrified by Kira's ideal world--yeah it might SEEM safer, with the criminals living in fear of inescapable death from an invisible judge, but I'd be too afraid of getting on the wrong side of Kira. Plus, even if Light Yagami really was a just judge, he doesn't get to add the years he takes off his victims' lives to his own like a Shinigami does. Who's to say the next Kira wouldn't turn out to be a straight-up psycho killer? That lawyer that he had do his dirty work while he was unable to do so himself was a good example, taking Kira's ideals too far (or at least too fast).

I understand there are quite a few Light/Kira fans out there, but I'm definitely not one of them. I'm firmly in the L/Near camp, and liked both of those characters the moment they were introduced.

I'm wondering if some of this is due to my personal beliefs. I hate to pass judgement on people or things, but I like to understand them instead. If I see someone doing something bad, my first thought isn't "They're bad--punish them!" but "Hmm...I wonder why he did that..." Perhaps that's wrong, and bad people are just straight-up bad, with no understandable reason, like D&D monsters that are "Always Chaotic Evil." But that's how I am, and I will likely go on trying to fix things instead of condemning them.

I like to debug programs--I treat it like a mystery in need of solving, as I add debugging code to gather evidence and narrow down the list of suspects to a single line of code that's not doing what it's supposed to be doing. That's one of my favorite parts of programming. Debugging is a challenge to me like tracking down Kira was a challenge to L. Though, null pointer exceptions and array overflows aren't likely to get my name written down in a death note, fortunately. I know that my friend with whom I was having my conversation about Death Note isn't like me in that respect. He likes to design error-free code from the very beginning, using engineering principles rather than the scientific ones I favor, and he likes to be tough on crime and criminals whereas I tend to be more forgiving (so long as I can understand the reasoning behind a crime, even if I don't accept it).

It's with thoughts like these that I tend to get recursive, thinking about thinking about thinking about things. I'm wondering now why the two of us (who like so many of the same things and get along so well) differ in this respect, and whether it's a matter of innate genetic tendencies, upbringing, or some intangible factor that transcends both of these. I suppose in the end it doesn't matter. Some people like Kira and are fine with killing dangerous (or even not-so-dangerous) criminals, and others like L and prefer to understand and "solve" criminal problems. Just like some people like anime and others can't stand it. I just have to think about things like that, just like I feel compelled to watch anime and read manga--I'm addicted to thought like I'm addicted to Japanese comics and cartoons (and gaming, and many other "nerd" things). It's just how I am. Whether this is a fault in need of correction, a fatal flaw that condemns me, or just a quirk, I don't know, but it's me.

Gurren Lagann

OK, I don't really want this to become just an anime blog, but since anime's obviously on my mind at the moment, I'll keep on that topic. I watched the first disk of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann last night, and it rocked! It's utterly ridiculous, silly super-mecha action, but done with so much enthusiasm (and quality) that it's hard not to like it. I felt a lot of FLCL-ishness in it (not surprising, as both are from Gainax) with the insane mecha designs and exaggerated character designs and animation. FLCL had a robot that looked like a giant hand--Gurren Lagann has robots that look like heads. And of course, no Gainax anime would be complete without bouncing boobies, and Gurren Lagann has plenty of "Gainax Bounce." All-in-all, one of the most fun anime shows I've seen in quite a while.

So, like, watch it. And stuff.

Anime Expo 2008

Woohoo, I'm finally getting into the whole Blog thing, and decided to start on a high note. Anime Expo 2008 was last weekend, and it was a blast. I was a bit worried about the location--I'd been to the LA convention center a couple of times before, and while I knew it was huge, which AX needed, it was also in...let's say not the best of neighborhoods. Things have improved there a lot! There's still some bad-looking areas not far, but most of the off-site stuff I was interested in (such as food!) was to the north, and that was pretty much standard downtown business district, and didn't feel bad at all. There was even a convenience store there that sold Pocky--a necessity for any anime convention attendee.

I have to say that this was the smoothest-run AX I've been to in a while. Certainly went better than last year's Long Beach debacle. They've finally figured out how to do prereg badge pickup right, for one thing. Even though there was a car wreck on the highway on Wednesday and my friend and I missed the pre-con badge pickup by like 5 minutes, and had to get our badges in the morning, it was still only a matter of a few minutes, not hours. Even the AMV contest ran smoothly--no stolen DVDs or unresolvable technical issues.

The only downside to the location was transportation. Traffic was mercifully light, especially for LA, but it still was a long way from Orange County, where I live, relative to Anaheim. But that's just my own perspective. If you're coming from Japan, or even just from out of state, there's not that much difference between LA and Anaheim. But I'm a self-centered bastard, so I'll allow myself to gripe about that :)

As far as con content, there were some good panels and workshops this year. I learned some very cool Photoshop tricks, for one thing. Also, the Paranormal Japan panel was very good, despite the technical difficulties. If you were also there, and you're curious, I'm the cat who talked about foxes.

I confess that at first I was disheartened by the exhibit hall. Not that it wasn't huge and stuffed to the gills with anime and manga stuff. It was, and I bought way too much, as I usually do at AX. But it was mostly retailers, and a lot of them were selling toys and anime collectibles, which I'm less interested in than I am actual anime and manga. I missed the huge ADV booth, which was a fixture of AX in my experience. With Geneon gone, and ADV boothless, I felt concerned about the companies that provide my drug of choice (anime).

However, when I attended the panels I started to feel better. ADV had a real reason for not having a booth, and they're working to get their issues resolved and get back to selling anime--hopefully they'll be back in full force next year and I'll be able to buy some anime at that big booth again. The anime market is changing, and some of those changes I don't like (I don't watch television, and I don't download video files over my slow internet connection, so broadcast anime and iTunes anime aren't that useful to me). However, some changes I do like. It sounds like Funimation is going to do more full-season box-sets rather than individual DVDs, which makes it easier for me to buy a whole series. I tend to get impatient and buy the individual DVDs, and sometimes I have trouble completing my collection. I think the only whole-series packs I have are Escaflowne (my all-time favorite series, which I didn't buy individual DVDs of because I already had it on VHS) and Noein, which I just bought last weekend.

Anyhow, I had a great time, and most of my fears turned out to be unfounded. And I got tons of anime and manga, so I'm happy.