Messages

Finished His Master's Voice by Stanisław Lem recently, and currently wrapping up Solaris. Good shit, though I liked HMV better.

Reading Lem, I imagine us to be the same kind of cerebral doofus. His work is helping me find some of the things I want to say about life.

HMV is great because he takes the usual first contact story and really unpacks what a universal signal or the closest possible thing to it would have to be. I didn't care about the story--there almost wasn't one--but the reasoning process he sets about in reverse-engineering the supposedly intentional is some quality brain jockeying. Do recommend.

Damn, that was good. Like Cain said, not a good film. But good.

I'm five sessions into DMing my first campaign, and the suspicious nature and malign intent of the player characters makes it so wonderfully easy to create more story hooks.

I figured out the larger story of the setting a few weeks ago (it's in the Forgotten Realms, and some cool lore-based shit is going to happen), but for now the party is mostly caught up in intrigue with a group of anonymous ne'er-do-wells in this small village. They misdirected and beat up guards to seize control of one of the two guard towers in town, just for the chance to spy on what some of them have chosen to treat as nemeses 

Attacking the town guard, eh?  If you can't use that like Junkenstien uses a crowbar, hang it up.

They are obviously desperadoes and now outlaws.  They should start seeing wanted posters of themselves soon.  Bounty hunters are a thing.

There were these guys in suits, who introduced themselves by the name of their pattern of choice (Argyle, Paisley, and Gingham), lying and cajoling the party into doing their bidding--but consistently paying. The party's half-orc monk (he's a conflicted dude) got pissed at being duped and ran to confront them alone. He's going to wake up in a pine box. Another party member, a gnomish drug dealer, tried to out the "suits" to one of the guards after beating the guard within an inch of his life. An arrow from elsewhere finished the job, and now there's an investigation underway.

Mostly the suits have been using them for a harassment campaign that culminated in an assassination of someone who left their ranks. That's the only reason the suits were in the town in the first place. Now they are gone, their suits left behind and anonymity fully restored, and the party has been paid with a strange bauble containing a very old map of Faerûn. With it will come the first inklings of the main arc. Differences in the map vs. the present-day landscape will lead the players to certain artifacts from the lost Empire of Netheril, and meddling in forces they don't understand may draw the attention of Netheril's ancient enemies, the phaerimm.

Also worth mentioning that the guard could have been a valued asset to a local crime syndicate or guild, also family ties or perhaps lover now UPSET, or the only good factor holding someone or something from taking more bold actions.

Killing cops is just bad.

Good ideas. This town is small, mostly human, and suspicious of outsiders. The players will find it even less hospitable than before, and may finally be run out after this next minor arc (missing townsfolk and a plea for help from the mayor) is resolved.

I'm five sessions into DMing my first campaign, and the suspicious nature and malign intent of the player characters makes it so wonderfully easy to create more story hooks.

I figured out the larger story of the setting a few weeks ago (it's in the Forgotten Realms, and some cool lore-based shit is going to happen), but for now the party is mostly caught up in intrigue with a group of anonymous ne'er-do-wells in this small village. They misdirected and beat up guards to seize control of one of the two guard towers in town, just for the chance to spy on what some of them have chosen to treat as nemeses 

The quantum bullshit (and other bullshit) in the piece aside, I do find it neat how contemporary neuropsychology and cognitive science is faced with similar problems to medieval metaphysics.

Universals were a hot-button issue back in the day: what makes stuff that is good, good? We think there's this monolithic thing, The Good. Do things that are good contain a piece of it? Or are they molded by it, as wax is displaced by a seal ring into a likeness? What is the relationship between the universal and the individual?

Nowadays we have questions like, what is the relationship between qualia (our experiences of the world) and unmediated reality?

Calling barstool here is spot on, though: if qualia did not relate to unmediated reality closely enough, we would not be able to survive.

This is not to say the experience of wetness has anything to do with what water actually is, only that the consistency of that experience in relation to the unmediated reality of what we recognize as water allows us to create an understanding of it, weave it into our frameworks of associations and meanings. Likewise, a fact need not capture the essence of what it describes--it is a useful relation.

Someone has read enough occult and academic writing to try to parrot the style without understanding the content. Wanna-be gurus tend to make this mistake a lot.

It is not known if the priests realized that thereby they fixed the contraries too, or if they feared losing their prosperous pantheon-managements, when they exiled this so called "Aton" to (or with) the Israeli tribes, whom he henceforth ruled under the term JHVH.

STOP ABUSING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE LIKE THIS. Learn2make sense pls.

To be fair, plenty of occult and academic writing is likewise devoid of content. But yes.

That it does.

that sounds really interesting.

So tell us - did the Greeks believe their myths?

Don't want to spoil it--has a surprise ending.

Just kidding. The average Greek would profess belief but be completely weirded out if you told them Athena had just gotten married, because it was implicit to the myths and unconsciously understood by the Greeks that mythic time was different from ordinary time. Typically historians didn't believe in the gods, but they had this notion that utter crap cannot erupt out of nowhere, so if a myth was too fantastic to believe, they would attempt to discern the kernel of truth it was based on. Interestingly, they often still doubted the stories they collected but felt a duty as historiographers to report the tales as they found them. This "objectivity" lent them a peculiar authority.


By the way, happy birthday.

lol

well said, lmno


Aaaaaaanyway, almost finished with Paul Veyne's Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? which tackles its titular question as well as the more general question of what it means to believe in contradictory "programs of truth" simultaneously. Really cool book, do recommend.

I often wonder what it would be like to have a dormant sense outside the usual five (and proprioception), and like to think it could be awakened with careful effort. You can't know what it will be like. You need to go about creating the necessary mental categories and relaxing the habits of your perception and thought to let it take on a reality as sharp as sight or hearing. I tie my mind in knots trying to figure out what it would be like, and then I remember that every skill ever acquired is essentially that, a new sense. A nonmusician cannot hear what a musician can, and a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. There are countless examples and I won't bore you with the details, but I was looking for some kind of transcendence because life is too fucking good to end.

But the meatbox will break down and the filthy, stinking television show called your life will be cancelled. We retreat into tales of pearly gates and life eternal but what's the point of heaven without a fucking body? There is nowhere to run but in this life, and the pain and the pleasure are ours alone. The dead cannot live in stories.

At least the Road Runner could escape into Wile E. Coyote's paintings. We hide in the fetid castrated nether regions of the afterlife when we are up to our necks in shit, but the shit never goes away. It's what we're really made of, after all.

ALIVE!!!!!!!!!


I give you the Apocalypse

Rereading Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, and if I can get my Kindle working again I'll be able to finish Artaud's The Theatre and Its Double

Hey Req, did you get that server up and running? If it's still going, I'd love to drop in.

...are apparently far more addictive than previously thought

hxxp://www.wmctv.com/Global/story.asp?S=13855613