Not freelancing

It feels curiously liberating, not freelancing.

Towards the end of last year, I was invited to submit an article for this publisher, more or less to test my mettle. I got the reply that my writing was flowery, and that if I inundated their monthly pet magazine with articles which didn't have the flowery they might ask me if I could join them again next year. A very good compliment. One I have taken to heart.

I have begun by eliminating all the flowery from my novel, which takes priority.

Nothing should puzzle an editor more than a writer who disdains money as a motive for getting published. Besides, their demands were high, even for me - typically 80,000 words per month or so.

If I could do 80k a month, I'd be writing my own novels, one after the other, and probably getting them published with one hell of a backlog of books awaiting a green light.

So, basically, no. Nice compliment. No, thank you.

Karen Heald - "Visualising The Invisible"

Here's a link to the art exhibit currently running in Glyndwr Uni's art college and Catrin finch building on the main campus.

It was a magnificent art exhibit. Well worth attending. More about this later.

Life

I've bumped into one too many "Everything You've Been Told Is A Lie" posts now. I want to say something.

I've discovered the things I know, piecing together the things I know based on my research, my reading of scientific and tech journals in college and elsewhere, and the occasional experimentation. I never relied upon a newspaper headline or the word of the man in the pub, or a teacher, priests or even parents - the font of everybody's deepest, most dearly-held lies and strongest sexual hangups.

I haven't been told what's what. I stepped up and learned what I know. When I say "All that I know is wrong," it's because new evidence has turned up that turns over all my theories. Which is great, because it makes room for new theories.

That's Science. That's life.

What I know, I keep to myself. Occasionally I let someone know what it is that I feel, and once in a while I let loose a tidbit of what I understand to be true. The days when, for me, Truth was written in stone are long gone. When "all that I know is wrong," it doesn't mean "My whole world is b0rked! I need a new guru! I can't live without somebody holding my hand!" It's because scientific theories have become mere hypotheses again - usually because something new has happened reigniting my curiosity to find out what it all means, rather than the shock of ripping off of the mask to discover that Professor Whyteley the Curator is actually some slavering werewolf.

(Erm, meddling kids, I think that's actually supposed to be the other way round ...)

When you're a kid, you learn that you can live with a barked shin, a scraped arm. It hurts, but you soon get over it. Most folks never realise that you can also get past the Tarot XVI "The Tower Struck By Lightning" with much the same reaction. A worldview shattered hurts, but you get over it because it's no worse than a scrape.

I'm sufficiently self-aware these days to realise when I've stepped across the border of The Land of Stupid, and sufficiently self-forgiving to let it go once I've come back to my mind and it's once more free of delusions. However, I know of many people who cannot make this leap of understanding; even those of my age, who went through the same educational system I did (and even got better grades - what does that say about the educational system?).

Ever hear of the Navras prayer? It's an old Sanskrit prayer which they offer in Indian schools.

Asatoma sadgamaya
Tamasoma jyotir gamaya
Mrityor amritam gamaya

Om shanti shanti shanti

Jnani manasa saha
Buddhis ca na vicestate
Tam ahuh paramam gatim


It translates as

From delusion lead me to truth
From darkness lead me to light
From death lead me to immortality.

Let there be peace everywhere

When the five senses and the mind are still,
and reason itself rests in silence,
then begins the Path supreme.

The truth rests between the questions and the answers, in that moment where any answer is possible, and before Schrodinger collapses the eigenvector on that poor damned cat.

Oh, All these "They're doing XYZ because XYZ will KILL YOU!" YouTube rants forget one thing.

We're all dying anyway. Those of us who will live to see 2100 are probably still in nappies right now, or haven't been born yet; nobody alive right now will live to see 2200, no matter what. Something is going to kill you - and I'd call it a safe wager that their personal death is the face that stares back at them in the mirror. Not chemtrails or vaccinations or the New World Order. Themselves, and their stupidity.

Honestly, so-called "intelligent" people make the worst fools. Which means us poor bloody fools have to work twice as hard at taking up the slack and being intelligent on behalf of those who are abrogating that duty.

Om shanti shanti shanti.

I hate RPG game balance

Game balance. One player has an uber edge, so the rules arbitrarily nobble that uber edge to give the other players a chance.

Go and look up Oscar Pistorius. He lost his legs, and had them fitted with prosthetic limbs. When pitted against regular Olympians he actually beat the world's fastest runners, but the Olynpic committee forced him back to the Paralympics. Yeah, way to keep the raspberries in the bloody ghetto, right?

We now know him as Blade Runner:-





A character like this in am RPG would probably be arbitrarily saddled with some stupid drawback like "loss of Essence" or "loss of Humanity" because of his bionics.

Does he look like he's lost any Essence or Humanity?

And just now, reading Signs & Portents Magazine number 82 (a Mongoose Publishing RPG mag), a section on augmetics and prosthetics in Traveller - bionics, IOW - says something like "Psionics and augments are very detrimental," dah dah dah yadda yadda yadda."

HOW THE HELL DO THEY KNOW?

What if they discovered that a character's high-tech cybernetic spinal rewiring, designed to allow him to function fully after an accident or exposure to some alien pathogen that had all but eaten away at his nervous system, actually acted as a potent psionic amplifier magnifying his natural psionic gifts a hundredfold and turning him into not only a physically powerful man, but also a devastating psychic and an accomplished warrior?

These drawbacks are arbitrarily written into the game rules to prevent all the characters from going "Oh, well if John's character can do that I'll just have my character jump into a thresher so I can get bionic legs like his."

Roleplaying has come up a hell of a long way from when it was all stat-driven, and games don't need to have stupid, irrelevant game-balancing rules woven in "just because it levels the playing field with the other characters." For Crom's sake, look at Babylon 5. You had Kosh Naranek, you had the Shadows, you had Lyta Alexander modified to be a psionic Doomsday weapon. But everybody seemed to get along happily even if they walked among Gods like Lorien, or the Soul Hunters with their strange alien technologies.

Vulcans in Star Trek are physically stronger, smarter, faster and tougher than humans - and yet the story is about the humans, not the Vulcans, who despite their superiority don't get to steal the show.

Once in a while, you get a Vulcan story like Amok Time - but it's about how humans deal with the alien culture the Vulcan characters take for granted. Again, you have fast, strong, tough Vulcans and feeble humans - but still the conflict is resolved satisfactorily without having to drag the Vulcans down.

Same deal for Klingons, Farscape's Luxans, whatever.

My point being, even if the character was all statted up the wazoo, with psionics, augments, enhancements, prosthetics and Ancient Artifacts enough to restock Warehouse 13 fifty times over, any competent Referee can still exercise game balance and focus the story on the other characters and their efforts to get through another day. They don't need some third party to do this job for them.

They never did.

Whoops

That's two posts I have made with the same aggravated mood. Better change them, or everybody's going to think I got up out of the wrong side of the bed this morning.

A classic insult

Having recently dug up an introductory PDF for the Vulcan language for Star Trek, I took in the Ancient High Golic Vulcan phrase

Du vravshal srashiv t'Kolinahr

which, roughly translated, means

You have not achieved Kolinahr

or, in simpler language,

You have failed to achieve a state of logic

Do you think I can use this as a veiled insult to stupid people or what? :D