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.