Finite Infinity - Delayed Reaction

It's been two weeks now since I upgraded to PivotX. It's worked well, and I'm really digging the Page function. However I had forgotten one of the first things I had wanted to do with it, until now.

One of the problems with working graveyard shift is there isn't really anything on television to watch in the middle of the night.  Not that there's much worth watching during daytime TV either, but I can always manage to find something or other then. But nights make things more diffucult. As I sat yesterday, finishing up coding on a script editor for Spiral Island, I searched for something to watch in the background, but found nothing better than Matrix Revolutions.

As I watched the film play out, I had the urge to go back and read through HEHEHEE! The Story, and the amusing continuation of the story we came up with there (as opposed to the official continuation that the course of Matrix Online has played out). As I did that, I remembered that I had wanted to post all my written material when PivotX came out. So that's what I'm finally doing now.

There will be four stages to this. The first, going up now, will be a dump of my main HEHEHE.ODT document, where most of what I had written was located. Second will be the collection of the few other documents I had saved information in separately, which, at the moment what I can recall, is a segment of Aura visiting a zone based on OS-tans, and a summary document of the six fragments The Anaconda splits himself up into in Chapter Six. Third will be my second main document, BACKSTORY.ODT, which is where all my backstory work was done, telling roughly what happened between the end of the Chobits series up to the machine war in the Second Reniassance.

Those three documents will be posted unformatted, unedited. The first document has something struck out in it, since I had meant to re-edit the wording on the line but never got back to it, and in both sections not every event is in it's proper chronological order. The last document will be from two hand-written sections I penned while at a family reunion, the first describing the fight between Freya and the Architect, and the second the final ending of Ties to Infinity (not counting the extra GU-based chapter), the fragment I actually got the tile of the story from. Since I have to type both of these in, I might add some more to them, depending on what I'm in the mood for when I write it.

That Which is Known

If you ever are in an area of absolute quiet, still your breathing and move not a muscle. After a few seconds, you will notice that the silence has a sort of "sound" of its own, a kind of empty ringing tone. This is nothing unique; everyone will hear this, given the proper setting. An informed person will tell you that your brain is trying to interpret the lack of stimuli to your hearing and so creates a bit of a filler sound. This ringing sound actually serves a more arcane purpose, covering up a noise we are not meant to hear. This noise is not impossible to hear, and if you are persistent you can effectively "break" the cover-up sound.

The next time you are silent and hear the ringing, shout at the top of your lungs for about half a minute, then be abruptly silent. It will be different for everyone. Some will hear nothing different for dozens of tries. Others might pick up soft murmuring. A special few auditory heroes might clearly make it out on the first attempt. What you will hear is a voice that relays an account of events about to happen in the immediate future. It's like a sportscaster relaying the events occurring 10 seconds into the future.
- Internet-born Creepypasta: The Voice

This is a movie review of sorts for Knowing. I say of sorts because I'm not a movie critic, and it's rare that I talk down about a movie. This is simply because I don't generally watch movies that don't seem interesting to me, I only watch movies that I will like. A growing number of these become Nicholas Cage movies, as he becomes one of my favorite actors. But what I'm going to go into here is the story.

The apocalypse story is about a piece of paper covered with numbers, buried in an elementary school time capsure 50 years prior, which had predicted on it every major disaster after that day. As Cage wonders over the numbers, Cage's son starts seeing people, dubbed the "whisper people". The Voice continues as follows:

As time goes on, you will be able to make out this voice under increasingly noisy circumstances, to the point that it can be heard at any time by just concentrating. Such ability would doubtlessly be invaluable, no? You will be able react to any immediate danger, relate to people around you with greater ease. No one would ever surprise you. Now, of course you are wondering what sort of horrible catch this ability entails. Perhaps the tone of the voice is so horrible that it will drive you mad, or maybe the voice will only predict your death over and over again.

Of course this isn't the case, though, it’s a normal voice, your ears receive it no matter what, and it’s simply a matter of noticing. But there is a danger. For you see, where there is a voice, there is a body. And just like you will notice new sounds, so shall you notice new sights. More importantly, you will be noticed. 

I had thought this was one of the Easter Eggs from The King of Wolves, but it wasn't, so I had to take some time to find somewhere this was referenced besides saved posts from forums. But as soon as they stated talking about the whisper people, this short came to mind. It was at least over a year ago since I first read this story, I would think this would be on the internet for a lot longer. I would almost place this anonymous story from the internet as partial inspiration for this story, but who knows.

Anyway, back to the movie, I very much enjoyed it. It's a lot more real, a lot more bitter, then most "apocalypse" movies, with an ending you wouldn't expect from general Hollywood. Definately a movie I plan on buying as soon as it comes out.

Plug and Play

Neon Genesis Evangelion. Battle Royale. The Path. Dokapon Kingdom. Very much unrelated to each other. Yet there is no border, no distinction, in the realm of the subconcious. Where one would not combine normally, the mind is free to combine, mix and match, and do whatever it feels. The subconcious has no limits, no regulation, and the path it may take you would never expect. I do not remember the details of the dreams of the two nights resulting from these, but they certainly were complex.

Original Content

So I've got a second part up for that story now, accessible on the left. I might get one more out this week, then set it aside for a while before doing some more work on it.

Its rather refreshing, actually, to work on a new story. Nothing is already set, everything is free and open. I can do whatever I want, define whatever rules I see fit, completely ignoring anything else I have defined anywhere else. New characters, new world, a completely uncharted, undefined path, just waiting to go wherever the wills of imagination will go.

Red Ice

Okay, now I think I have everything stable in my configuration, and all my templates are uniform. Everything seems to be moving smooth, so time to roll forward. I'll have to clean up some of the older entries, because of glitches converting the language-specific entries to UTF, but that is something that I will deal with later.

With the new functions I can now post what PivotX calls "Pages", or simply static information that doesn't roll with the blog. This comes very handy, especially for a writing blog like this, because it allows me to then just put whatever I feel like on the site. So to start it off, I have put up the first part of a new story I started the other day, Red Ice.

To introduce it, this story is the prequel to a game I have been working on for handhelds on and off over the last year or so. The name comes from that game's projet codename, Project Red Ice. I haven't really been able to come up with anything better at the moment, so I figured I might as well just stick it here, since it is effectively nameless until I come up with a proper name for that game.

Template Trouble

Now I've updated the site to PivotX. However, some things are not acting the same way as they were in my test environment. I'm not sure what is going on, exactly, and I'll have to figure it out later. One everything's cleaned up, though, and running properly, I'm going to start with the new Pages function to post the first part of the new story I'm working on.

Modern Description

Posting from Linux right now, using BloGTK. I would just do it from the website, but Firefox is clashing with my color scheme settings and is making all the forms on the site white text on white background (or if I reverse the colors with Compiz, black text on black background). The Firefox plugin ScribeFire was no help, doing the same thing. This utility works well enough, so I'll run with it. Setting that all aside for now.

I'm working on a story right now, and, as I haven't worn any rings for some time, I had to look up which hand is for generic rings and which hand is reserved for wedding bands. Apparently it's a much more complex answer than I thought, with some countries doing the opposite of others. In general, though, tradition around here is wedding band on left hand.

What gets me, though, is one particular site. Or, more specifically, what gets me is what they have to do to explain the concept to people. This excerpt in particular:

So in the old days they had a simple answer: they put the ring on the third finger which they believed had a vein, artery or nerve (a sort of a USB cable) running directly to the heart.

A USB cable. That's the description they have to use for a nerve. Is the modern generation such that they are so technologically capable (a highly debatable point, but set that aside), but so biologically inept, that in order for them to understand the concept of the nervous system, we have to resort to having to explain it by using parallels to computers?

Nevermind the fact that USB is generally for expansion through external devices, something humans are hardly capable of biologically.

Temporal Thoughts Alike

Since Spiral Island and some of my other titles are RPGs, one of the things I reference to sometimes for ideas is the OGL-licensed System Reference Document, a subset of the 3.5 edition rules of Dungeons and Dragons. Although a rather good reference, I don't really actually ever play Dungeons and Dragons, so for me particularly it lies as merely a reference, and, since the system of Spiral Island is already established, mostly useless aside from ideas.

One particular part of it, though, the Unearthed Arcana materials, has something of far more value then strictly a gameplay system. The Sanity gameplay variant, which in itself contains a miniature DSM. When I came across this while reading through the variant systems, I began to get ideas, thinking it would be interesting to use actual DSM-defined disorders for characters, and had one particular character from the Spiral Island games in mind as one subject. However, there was something I had forgotten, which I just barely remembered a couple days ago.

What I had forgotten was something from back when I was in high school, and originally writing the story Spiral Island and starting the story for another game idea I got at the time. We were doing registrations for the next year, I think it was my Senior year. I couldn't advance in mathematics, as the AP Calculus class was a 2 period class and only held at the same time as another advanced class that I was taking, so I was left with some free space. While trying to fill it up, I had wandered upon the Psychology class in the course list, and from that I began to get ideas, thinking it would be interesting to use actual medically-defined disorders for characters, and had one particular character from the Spiral Island games in mind as one subject.

I copied and pasted that, aside from the acronym DSM, for that exact reason. The exact same thing had occurred to me, with the same ideas. I ended up registering for the class, but retained almost nothing of it. The most useful piece I had gained was knowledge of the DSM, which I hadn't really thought about otherwise since. That aside, however, I find it now very interesting that I had come up with the exact same ideas 7 years apart, without realizing that I had come up with the idea before.

Aitches

Continuing on with the previous topic of accents, another thing I've noticed change in my speech lately is the use of the letter "H". Or, more specifically, the lack of it. Growingly, recently, I've been dropping them, and pronouncing words without them. And I'm not even in in Soho.