Split Focus

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So I had idea of what it might be like to have multiple personalities earlier. My guess is that most people will stop reading now. If not, just keep in mind that I’m not meaning to offend anyone for whom this might be a sensitive issue.

Earlier this afternoon, I was playing a song on guitar, and I noticed something: I moved around, mentally. It was as though I wasn’t alone. I mean, I never felt what I would describe as another presence in the room, per se, at least not physically, but for a little while there, it did seem as though I adopted the perspective of someone else, someone who wasn’t ‘me’ (at least not in a way that I could recognize), but yet someone whom I was definitely immersed with.

This ‘not me’… ‘person’… I didn’t sense them exterior to myself. As I was playing guitar and doing the best I could not to sound like crap singing along, I started paying extra close attention to what I was doing. Some time had passed. I was barely conscious of the fact that I had been talking through my thought process out loud to myself. From the voice/perspective of what I can only describe as a bonafide music teacher.

Memorize that picking pattern. Start over. Do it till you get it right. Slow it down if you need to. Now keep doing it right. Again. Again. Again. Good.

You’re slouching. Support your voice, from the diaphragm.

Feel the dynamics, don’t just play them.

Quit it. You think you’ll have time to stop and burp if this were live in front of an audience? Either disguise it or wait.

Listen. You hearing that? That’s what this part of the song is supposed to sound like! Keep it up.

So, a mix bag of tips and pointers, complements and constructive criticism, all of which I learned from my teachers from high school and college. Seems like I’m just regurgitating information, right? I’m not so sure. It felt an awful lot like I was both myself saying the things that I know that I already knew AND I was someone else, someone who was hearing all of it as though for the first time in either a very long time, or perhaps even just for the first time, ever.

Logically, I know I wasn’t ‘hearing’ anything, let alone anything new, but it sure as hell felt like I was.

Maybe I just have an over active imagination, which would usually be a good thing, being an aspiring writer as well and all, but in this case, when I ‘realized’ this seeming split was taking place, there was difficulty ‘disengaging’ from it. When I felt like I was wholly back into my own head space, it was almost like breaking a spell, snapping out of it.

I’m not claiming to have multiple personalities, or to know the first thing about what it’d be like through the eyes of someone who does. What little I know about the topic comes mostly from tv, so… I know essentially nothing, in other words. This little ‘episode’ could have been any number of things (petit mal epilepsy?), but it did get me thinking: What if it were possible to adopt/permit the presence of additional personalities by choice? Would we? Should we?

My default attitude would largely have been “hell no!” Too much at risk. What if an unwanted second-party internal personality became dominant and unrelenting? Could we ever trust a source guaranteeing that that could never happen? Who’d be willing to be a guinea pig? Maybe a neurological ‘sandbox’ environment would allow a safe, mental buffer space with which to experiment, but is anything really ever completely safe?

Regardless, after this experience, I realized that I might actually be down to try it. What I feel I could now expect, should the technology ever be developed and proven ‘safe’ (less dangerous than getting into a car and crossing town?), is that an additional internal personality would manifest itself in the form of coach, teacher, trainer, etc. In other words, for someone who wants to learn a new hands-on skill and/or improve on one, it would just be a simple matter of turning on a pre-selected ‘voice’ in your head (probably downloaded from a reviewed and rated repository), only you feel what they feel, you understand exactly what they’re trying to convey.

Essentially, if you want a demonstration, you simply tap into the appropriate bank of compiled experience (could have a name, a personality modelled after someone in particular, whatever) understand a set of directly-relayed instructions (should feel natural if you adopt enough of the alter), and then, simply, do.

Also, the free version should be the only version. Open source that shit.

Levels of Separation

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Under the right state of mind, or way of looking and thinking about things, sometimes I find it difficult to enjoy certain games. A number of diverting past-times are particularly well designed, capable of creating an immersive experience that, even if just for a brief moment, leave the one experiencing them unable to differentiate between their obvious fictional basis and their potential real world basis.

Case in point (and this is going back a little while now), but when Halo 4 was first released, I did a marathon run through. It took me awhile ’cause I like deliberating, taking my time, checking over everything, and basically just wasting time. No big deal, usually, except that this was one of the first video game titles that I played from beginning to end while high.

For the record, I enjoy a little weed from time to time. Mind you, I’m a ridiculously easy bake, and I can easily make $10 worth last me an entire month. I know tonnes of people who can’t even make that much last them half a day. So.

I don’t need much, and since I use so little, I develop almost no tolerance over time whatsoever. This helps keep it affordable. Usually, when I’m out, I’m out and it’s no big deal. Life goes on. I manage. However, I enjoy having some on hand for specific uses. I find that it really does help lubricate the cognitive machinery, and allows me to think of things with greater depth, or from unusual angles, or whatever. I’m not really sure what exactly it does do, but the TL;DR version is that it really helps me out in the creativity department.

We’ve all heard that before one time or another.

As much as I know from first hand experience the truth of that, there are instances of pot use which have other, unintended effects, such as while gaming. It helps me achieve a heightened degree of focus. Textures seem more vivid. Progression seems slower, allowing me time to take more details in as I go along. Events that happen in game seem more believable. Encounters with enemies seem much less like targets presenting themselves on a screen (to which I respond by pushing buttons in order to dispatch) and more like legitimate contact with some sort of supposedly hostile alien life form.

And of course they’re hostile! Don’t you seeing them firing at you? A voice of reason in my head might insist, if there were voices in my head. Testing that hypothesis is silly. I’ve played countless FPS titles before, not the least of which were prior titles in the same bloody Halo series. I know when the game is presenting me enemies and when it is presenting me with friendlies (or, more rarely neutrals).

As a gamer, my instincts are automatic. There is absolutely no moral imperative to question what it is that I do in the name of fun. If ever I found myself in doubt, all I would have to do is fail to return fire in response to being fired upon. The character that I play, the iconic Master Chief, drops in defeat. Dead. I restart from a previous check point, losing progress made.

Sounds awful! How dare those moving polygonal meshes execute scripts which generate coded beams of colour which just so happen to inconvenience my ability to get from various, vaguely similar A-to-B points in a rapid fashion! THEY MUST ALL BE DESTROYED!!!

And, because I’m just a gamer playing a completely fictional character in a completely fictional, computer-generated universe, pitted again completely non-sentient, computer-controlled AI, why on Earth shouldn’t I just enjoy the strongly implied acts of violence I’m evidently encouraged to carry out?

You see how describing it with alternative language sheds a different light on what a gaming experience can sometimes feel like? At almost no time do I ever question my actions playing First Person Shooters while not baked (I’d say ‘sober’, but it seems that alcohol only emphasizes the ‘okay-ness’ of simulated violence, so…). However, while baked, I find myself questioning everything.

The fact of the matter is that I have almost no understanding of what I’m really doing. I believe there are companies which hire artists (something I want to be!), programmers, designers, creative directors, and tonnes and tonnes more besides who spend ridiculous hours and funding to put a game together for the eventual enjoyment of gamers.

I don’t write code. I wouldn’t be able to interpret a block of C++ to save my life. And with the rate that technology is advancing (careening steadily closer and closer to Turing-approved AI), how do I know that I’m not actually playing a role in the deliberate destruction of a variety of under-credited artificial life forms, hmm? It wouldn’t be a stretch to attribute the tag ‘alien’ to such life forms, would it?

That’ll be a blog for another day.

For now, the point is to provide a basic commentary on what makes a game a game. If a game turned out to be a real and truly violent activity on some poorly-understood (likely informational) level, then I, among countless other well meaning gamers, would be guilty of cold-coded murder on multiple counts. If, however, a game is just a game, well then… Have fun! As for me, the lesson I think I’ve learned is to really limit how often I play games baked in order to still be able to enjoy them as they were intended to be. Otherwise, the layers of separation feel like they become stripped away, the experience becomes uncomfortably raw, and the immersion at times feels all too real.

Never Satisfied

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Sometimes, I hate being a perfectionist. Nothing I do is ever good enough, but I’m always under my own pressure to get things done regardless because I know that if I don’t keep that pressure on, my tendency to start projects but never finish them would take over.

However, when I do complete something (such as uploading a new song to my youtube channel), and I come back to it months or even years later, I see what I created and I usually cringe. I see the heart and the effort, but I also see how under developed that effort was.

At the time, it was alright. Good enough to put ‘out there’ as is and even feel somewhat proud of it, at any rate. Looking back, however, I struggle with mixed feelings. I think I’m wrong to feel any degree of shame in what I’ve done and shared from the heart, but I almost can’t help it. It’s all just so… bad. Like, honestly, awful.

This cuts into my ability to be productive and to progress. I have a tendency to revisit past projects and give them face lifts. Yes, I often see appreciable differences being made. I tend to feel grateful that I took the time to improve upon various existing somethings in my personal portfolio of creative somethings.

And that’s all well and good, but if you compare my overall creative output in recent years versus what I was able to accomplish roughly about a decade ago, I’ve clearly fallen into a slump. I’m not sure what I’d prefer right now: Messy proliferousness, or rare bursts of high-quality productions.

They say quality is better than quantity, but frankly, at this point in my life, I’m seriously beginning to favour the opposite. What do?

Counter Intel

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Image

“I have the gun. I make the ‘pew pew’ noises!”

Gotta love a little Hollywood embellishment once in awhile. But sometimes, the truth might be a little scarier than we’re seriously willing to accept. I’ve been on, off, and on either side of the fence when it comes to various activist issues, truth movements and conspiracy theories so many times that I’m guilty of being a blatantly self-denying, genuinely/falsely-enlightened, band-wagoning truther/sheople poster child if ever there was one, depending on your perspective, more times than I care to admit.

What I feel I have is an open mind. What I’m not sure I have is a proper gauge for what is actually factual information, and what is well-designed propaganda. What I want to briefly discuss, while I still have the drive to do so, is the matter of Fukushima. More specifically, the media’s handling of information coming out of Fukushima.

There are dozens upon dozens of self-proclaimed independent news outlets one can readily stumble upon all over the interwebs which claim to have information which is being spun and twisted — at best — or even withheld and straight up omitted — at worst — from public reports presented by just about every major mass media network out there. The mantra is the same everywhere you look: mass media is all controlled by interest groups pursuing agendas with zero obligation to actually provide the public with credible, factual information of genuine concern to them. They exist purely for the perpetuation of… whatever it is that they’re supposedly perpetuating.

I’m not explicitly stating my thoughts on “who’s right” one way or another here. Not that I don’t have my opinions, it’s just that, as far as I’m concerned, the issue is far bigger than a simple black and white breakdown analysis could ever accurately describe. What I will say is that there is definitely something going on. One way to see it for yourself is to simply do a google search for the term “Fukushima News”, and specify search hits from only within the past 30 days. Scroll down and peruse the first 3 or 4 pages. Take note of the number of well-recognized, traditional news networks sites you see providing any relevant reports. Scan a few of them. Note the general tone of the topics covered.

Now, contrast that with almost any reports pertaining to Fukushima in the last 30 days presented by sources you might consider to be less-traditional. Maybe they claim to be independent. Maybe they claim to be truth-seeking. Maybe you just haven’t heard of the given sites in question. Whatever the case, scan over just about any Fukushima-related report from the past 30 days they have provided an abundance of, and again notice general tone of the topics covered.

Specifically, notice the COMPLETE LACK of any comparison whatsoever.

I have nothing further to say. I’m still trying to get a sense of what I, personally, make of this severe discrepancy. I would, however, like to open the topic up for discussion. I’m not interested in opinionated rants, but if anyone else has been noticing this trend and has some well thought out, well, thoughts on the matter that they’d be willing to share, I’d like to hear them.

Artist in the Ambulance

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Copyright by Thrice, 2003, covered by Jaehoo.

Hey guys! I got to use my roommates’ underwater camera for non-underwater video recording, and this is what happened (sorry). I uploaded this to Youtube just now, but figured I’d share it with the blogging community as well.

Just to restate, I go by Jaehoo for my musical pursuits, and as Eccoweaver for most other things, including work on the still-very-much-a-work-in-progress literary/multi-media project called Elyen, for which this blog exists to help establish.

Just to cover my butt, I do not own the copyrights to this song, just covering it for fun. If you enjoy the video, please feel free to subscribe to my youtube channel here, but if you haven’t done so already, please also check out the original artist’s website and like all of their awesome stuff here as well. Cheers!

Vested Interest

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Systems can be fragile, only working under ideal conditions. Other times, they can be robust, designed to work even under inhospitable conditions. A particularly robust system can have the quality of being biased towards self-preservation. Not a bad thing in and of itself.

Problems arise when a system that includes the input of intelligent designers (as might be the case with computer systems and technical engineers) has a morally-irresponsible bottom line.

Many systems, however, are completely incapable of being personal. And good thing, too! Can you imagine if a hurricane was fully aware of the impact it was having on human life and local ecosystems? If they were aware and could do something about it yet elect not to, then they’re more than just destructive forces, they would be evil entities. If they’re aware of their impacts but can’t change anything, assuming they would if they could, then they come away from the experience carrying extreme guilt. Considering how unpreventable they are, extending said extreme weather system’s sensitivity to such a degree would only torture the poor cyclone with guilt and self-loathing (if it were biased to favour the well-being of living beings. There’s nothing saying that that must be the case). All for what? It’s not like it can do anything but follow the course of events as they unfold. A system like that isn’t designed to make it’s own decisions and direct it’s own actions (as far as I am aware. Correct me if I’m wrong). It would appear that such systems follow the teachings of Chaos to the exclusion of all others.

For other systems, it’s too bad they could not be more sensitive to their impacts. Perhaps there’s plenty of potential for intelligent decision-making, but such capability is poorly exercised. A lot of things that we take for granted come from this second kind of system.

Some systems are so complex, however, that intelligent, decision-making stages are too far removed from other stages, ones where, say, consequences are experienced, and where feedback is imprecise at the best of times.

So, too many times, intelligent decision-makers are not even aware that systems they’ve put in place may be causing more harm than good. The focus is in the wrong place (profit, 9 times out of 10). In the pursuit of misguided goals, we make barbaric choices. We’re quick to dismiss ethical concerns we’re confronted with, justifying our actions, minimizing our faults, shifting the focus on ‘greater evils’, twisting the facts, and basically doing anything and everything we can to cocoon ourselves from the negative realities of events we’re directly or indirectly responsible for setting into motion.

If there’s money to be had, we’ll engage and indulge in all manner or inexcusable behaviour, with no more regard for human, animal, plant, or any other natural creation’s inherent dignity than we can get away with neglecting (and even abusing) in the court of law.

And even then, with enough money on our side, it’s perhaps easier to pay the wrong people in the right places off than actually grow a sense of real responsibility and start making some genuinely good decisions. It’s more profitable to keep existing systems in place, and improve them only towards widening said profit margins than to do just about anything and everything else within our power to influence and control.

When we have these kinds of deeply vested interests, we will go so far as to destroy the pioneering spirits of entrepreneuring individuals, people with dreams of changing the status quo for the better, and keen vision for how to do so. [edit: while there’s an incredible number of awesome humans with commendable values, unless or until the kind of humans I have talking about (the kind who exploit anything and everything out of greed) are dealt with, I don’t see good odds of being allowed outside this universe (and go any other place, like Drendast where universes intersect)]

It doesn’t matter who we are. We all need to take a good hard look inside every once in a while and, with as little bias in our own favour as we humanly can (never a perfect check and balance, but it’s better than nothing), admit to ourselves what patterns of behaviour we have in our lives which contribute towards the perpetuating of systems that, in all seriousness, insult the very core of our beings, ultimately bringing harm to the well being and dignity of ourselves and others here on the only planet we’ve presently got.

Oh, and it never hurts to gain the perspective of others, especially others who can be trusted to be honest. How do we know who those others might be? We can never be sure (another imperfect check and balance), but if the feedback we get from others is ever uncomfortable, odds are it isn’t being candy coated, and that, at least, is never a bad sign.

Dissonance

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I have to admit, I haven’t left the shell of my comfortable existence very much lately. Since moving into the place that I’m currently in at the beginning of September, I haven’t once spent a night anywhere other than in my own bed up until the night of Christmas Eve. I was invited to spend the night and Christmas day with my girlfriend’s family, most of whom I hadn’t even met yet.

Sleeping somewhere other than in my bed wasn’t uncomfortable in and of itself. It was a bundled package which included other events, such as meeting a respectable number of new people (~10), getting all kinds of friendly attention from an almost equal number of their pets, visiting 3 entirely new places these new-to-me people and their pets lived in, and otherwise being completely out of my element for a period of approximately 30 hours.

In all of that, I have no complaints. I actually had an enjoyable time. I keep forgetting that I have that quality. I’ll explain. I’m an introvert. I spend most of my time lately in my living room with my laptop in front of me. Leaving the house is not something I actively seek out opportunities for, and I’m generally happier not having to be involved in social functions where I know less than 2 people, but I was invited. I agreed to go and spend time with her and her family instead of stay at home by myself ’cause, let’s face it, not even I’m that anti-social.

And, for once, I didn’t even hesitate to agree. She’s invited me to one or two previous family functions, but I hummed and hawed my uncertainty and skittishness before eventually declining. I felt guilty almost immediately, but I also felt relief. I don’t like that I tend to be so nervous and shy, but in this instance, I wasn’t going to let that stop me from finally biting the bullet and meeting everyone. Sure enough, I had absolutely nothing to worry about.

The only dissonance I felt and can discuss, however, pertains to differences in world views. We all know the social etiquette advice warning people to avoid bringing up religion or politics during family functions. That wasn’t really an issue in this particular adventure, but I’d say there was something like it afoot.

I am open to the idea of Panspermia which is the theory that life may have arisen elsewhere in the cosmos, and bits and pieces of that life could have hitched rides on asteroids and other things in space we too often call “debris” and/or “materials”, ending up all over the place, including Earth. Or like in the opening to Prometheus. Cool. Or even like on Ancient Aliens.

Or maybe not. I don’t know.

And that’s my point. I sure as hell don’t know everything about everything, but I’ve heard a lot of different ideas. I like ideas. Nay! I heckin’ LOVE ideas! But… they’re just so weird when other people talk about the same sorts of things. It’s not as easy to connect to people with some of the same weird ideas as me as I thought it’d be. I mean, sometimes it’s great. Other times, like recently, I find myself hearing things that I partly agree with mixed with other things, hard to place things, which have the effect of turning me off from the conversation.

For example, I can get excited about ideas and pop off all kinds of ‘what ifs’, but when I hear someone else discuss the same things less from a speculating and theoretical standpoint and more from a “here’s how it is” point of view, I withdraw.

I feel cognitive dissonance each and every time I hear an opinion presented with the same authority one might use when presenting a fact, even if I happen to almost fully agree (‘almost’ because, if I completely agreed, I’d assume my opinion was based on fact, and that, therefore, their’s  likely was as well. I am aware that that isn’t always true). I’m too long winded and reliant on the typed word to formulate an effective, balanced and fair response in the event that I think someone is mostly right when sharing their thoughts in person, but that they might do well to keep an open mind. Just in case.

What I can say is that it is, nevertheless, a thing of beauty to hear new voices with varying degrees of conviction in a number of things I don’t normally hear people discussing, whether or not I agree.

Nuts and Bolts and Progress!

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I try to do too much at once. I have been sitting on the same story now for over a decade. Obviously, it’s evolved. It’s nothing at all what it was when I originally envisioned it, but my problem is that I have a bit of a hard time committing to any particular version of the story. Who knows if, come tomorrow, I’ll see the story from some new, unforeseen angle and what to redraft the whole thing through the filter of the new vision.

Also, I can’t fully settle on what events should happen when. Lots of ideas, but they’re all disjointed. There’s a few overarching themes I have in mind, but very little substantial glue to bring it all together and hold it there in a way that feels quite natural. At least not just yet.

What is becoming more and more obvious to me is that certain things cannot be planned. There are a great many things which can only be discovered during the writing process itself. I’m finding myself increasingly guilty of letting ideas evolve exclusively in my head on their own to such a highly specialized extent that they suddenly start having very little in common with the heart of the rest of the story as a whole.

Instead, when I take to writing my ideas out in the direct context of actual story material, no matter how simple and incomplete they may be at first, they’ll at least have the benefit of being cohesive with the over arching vision. I’m now facing a turning point where I may need to open myself to some serious pruning. Eventually, the lofty and abstract concepts I’d like to feature in the story will make their appearance, but will they express themselves to the same refined extent which they currently exist in my head, or will they take an unexpected turn and show me something new instead? I’m getting closer to finding out each and every day.

Speaking of which, I’ve been busy the last couple of days. I’ve written a chapter for my story, Elyen, and will be looking to get some feed back from friends soon enough. If all goes well, I’ll share it online for anyone who’s interested in actually reading what I’ve been working on, rather than reading me talking about what I’ve been working on. Keep an eye out for that in the coming weeks.

Also, I drafted up a short poem called “Intentions” (originally called “Pretentious”), hosted on Wattpad. If you get a chance, please check it out and let me know what you think! It’s a quick read.

https://embed.wattpad.com/story/10888194
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Nothing To Do With Thermal Lensing

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I have an idea, but it’s hard to explain. It’s about heat and life and stuff.

And, after a few days of being stagnant in the keeping-up-with-blogging department, I feel as though that is precisely what I should ramble about today: my difficulty explaining things.

The idea that I had been struggling with trying to share has lead to a deeper vice of mine, and that is that I struggle with describing things that are of a somewhat unfamiliar nature, period. If it were up to me to describe what snow looked and felt like to members of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon in order to not be cooked alive (for whatever reason), I’d be screwed. Doesn’t matter how well acquainted I am with the concept, it’s others whom I must enlighten.

So, when I want to write a book that’s intended to be chock full of interesting, weird, abstract concepts, and each of those concepts reinforce other strange ones, I am forced to go at it from a developmental approach: Start with the basics, establish a foundation, then build up.

The reason I find this difficult is because I want the reader to be plunged right in. I want to throw a reasonably diverse mixture of both familiar and unfamiliar ideas at them from the outset, so that way, there’d be things they can latch on to, and there’d be things they’re left wondering about.

From there, I fully intend on developing those unfamiliar threads in such a way that they gradually evolve in the reader’s mind, like a jigsaw puzzle slowly coming together, until they eventually become something they find intimately familiar. And/or, in the weaving of other concepts and threads, I will put a foundation together in such a way that all of the unfamiliar bits (which, to be fair, I would only mete out a reasonably little at a time) become instantly clear all at once, as though the reader were given the cipher for a crucial code they’ve been unable to solve for a long time.

So, my idea involving heat and life and stuff could be an unknown concept that instantly pops when the right information comes along, or one that slowly evolves over time, or, more likely, one that’s best left alone until the right fundamental principles that the universe of the story happens to abide by are first established. But therein lies another difficulty: it seems to me almost that all of the story’s universe’s fundamental principles are, themselves, unfamiliar and abstract.

So.

What does my story, Elyen, have in common with anything a human from Earth alive shortly after the turn of the 21st century might find familiar?

– The main characters are usually humanoid, so there’s often strong physical resemblance
– There are, more often than not, weather events that are similar to what we might expect here on earth
– Though the grander setting is nothing at all like Earth, from the perspective of a given humanoid character on the ground, the existence of mountains, bodies of water, forests, plains, desserts, etc., are all Earth-like enough for most readers to connect with
– Fantastic technologies exist which should be explainable in a way that fans of Sci-fi would have little difficulty appreciating
– Various forms of magic exist that fans of Fantasy will have little trouble understanding

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s just a cursory list for now. Here’s a list of some of the concepts I’m toying with which, I believe, are less common and therefore much trickier (but not impossible) to explain:

– “The Singularity” is the name of a type of major event that happens at various points throughout the history of the people of the story (yes, as in, there’s been more than one such event in Drendain history)
– Drendast is the name of the planet most of the events of the story takes place on. Drendast is a mega Aether-world, so large that it has multiple stars the size of Earth’s sun revolving around it, and not the other way around
– Most of the characters and beings on Drendast are photovores, naturally evolved [or, in some cases, genetically engineered] to subsist solely on the nearly perpetual light from the planet’s suns
– Physics on an Aether-world like Drendast are conveniently exotic. ‘Anomalies’, such as tri-pole magnetism, are taken for granted here
– The overarching philosophy behind the story incorporates, among other things, an offshoot of Taoism, which, if I understand anything at all about, only proves to me that I understand nothing at all
– Drendast happens to serve as a kind of ‘hub’ within it’s local multiverse, bridging connections via Conduits (think wormholes and you’ve basically got it) between universes both near and far.

And there’s loads and loads more concepts besides that.

The point is that I don’t always know where to start when it comes time to describe something. When I want to talk about a race of beings based on heat (rather than, say, carbon), I soon find myself struggling to explain their environment and behaviour, both of which involve (from the what I assume is a typical human perspective) altered states of reality, vaguely spiritual themes, Immersion (another very key concept I’m aiming to expound upon in the near future), and so on and so forth. Not easy.

Suddenly, explaining just one thing (what this race of heat-based beings are all about) is no longer just one thing, but many things, each of which are equally tricky.

I’m long winded. I’m still new to this whole blogging thing, and I don’t think I’ve quite figured out the most appropriate and tasteful format for presenting ideas, especially in terms of length, so, my biggest concern is not going on and on forever. To this end, I think I’m gonna start explaining concepts in parts. Starting after this blog, if I want to share a complex idea, expect to see it presented in chunks.

Or maybe I can do up a sort of wiki reference page, since I’m almost certain to reference earlier blog entries when presenting new ones related to Elyen. Something for me to look into. Anyways, that’d be all for now.

Window

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So I’m an over thinker. Most of the time, I don’t even realizing when I’m over thinking. It’s been my natural state for long enough that it takes a substantially over charged level of over thinking before I feel lost in the swirling inertia for some time, as is often the case right before trying to go to sleep, and even then.

Speaking of sleep, I’m pretty sure that, for the first 20 minutes or so of laying my head down, I am fully conscious of the random and rapid fluttering of my eyes’ lenses. At first, they’ll twitch to the rhythm of something I’m listening to, especially if it’s something catchy and it’s my first time hearing it, as tends to be the case when I’m trying out new stations to on jango. My guess is that there’s a underlying level of sensitivity that comes with listening to something new but not completely unfamiliar.

In the case of a song, if it’s in the same genre as others I listen to, my brain is already expecting to hear certain patterns. Even in borderline sleep, my nerves are all but raw from synthesizing what I know to expect against what I am actually currently experiencing, ready to judge whether I’m liking the new presentation or not. This period and level of automatic active listening and pattern recognition/prediction doesn’t last for very long, so I’m not losing sleep over it.

It’s also in this state of borderline sleeping that I sometimes imagine what’s going on in my brain as though I were looking at it from within on a micrometer scale, in which case, I imagine a light show the likes of which I realize I can never, ever be capable of fully imagining in the first place. It’s simply beyond the scope of my human comprehension. The firing of billions of neurons as they respond to stimuli that was passed along to them by their neighbouring neurons via synapses, making and reforming connections by the thousands at almost every instant… Unreal.

It’s exactly that process that I can’t help picturing even as certain seemingly major new connections feel as though they’re being initially formed.

I feel as though I have ridiculously frequently ‘eureka’ moments resulting from this almost-passive ability to mentally keep my finger on the pulse on my own thought processes. And before anyone goes concluding that I’m full of myself, I should clarify. What I experience in my head, when in hyper over thinking states like this, often borders on absolute chaos. So, unless chaos is the same thing as genius, then I’m just a thinker, feeler and a dreamer, as many of us are, and nothing more.

Nonetheless, I’m occasionally compelled to believe that I sometimes come a lot closer to something more. Whether that belief is based on anything factual rather than pure myth is a debate for another time. As I lay with my head on the pillow, eyes closed, loads of images appear in my head, fluctuating and morphing into different forms, sometimes very quickly, and often accompanied by equally ever changing thoughts, feelings, things that I “know”, and lots more besides. They all take on new expressions within a fluid milieu of pure potential. Makes me wish I had a better knack for visual arts. I would paint the most peculiar things.

Anyways, it’s in this state that my brain very rapidly makes all these new connections, new associations between things that, only moments ago when I was awake, I would have considered to be separate entities in every way. When the implications of some of these new associations occurs to me, I can get very excited, like I’ve hit upon some lost secret of the ancient shamanic world, or some message from beings from the future, or some hidden inner truth, or something, doesn’t matter what, ’cause regardless, it always feels profound.

The problem invariably arises when I try to retrace my thoughts to see how I arrived at my latest, hastily formed new epiphanies. More often than not, I fail to connect all of the dots the same way twice. My thoughts have a tendency to accomplish their most robust evolution while the rest of my brain is accomplishing it’s best impression of a very tired and soon to be sleeping person. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyways) that, in this state, my focus begins to breakdown, missing steps and stages, leaving me with an incomplete record of events with which to later reconstruct entire world-shattering revelations.

All it can take to derail the spark of discovery is for one element within the chain, the list of ingredients, the compilation process, to derive from something I can’t identify a reasonably sound source for in the morning. When this happens, coupled with the missing steps mentioned above, the entire logic of my oh so grand insight suddenly looks ridiculously absurd and baseless.

But still, for what it’s worth, there’s a lot that I can do with the incomplete material my brain serves up. Yes, there will be holes, sometimes even blatant ones, but it can still be art. I can still create entire fictional worlds from some of these cognitive tid bits. Stories can still be told, and go on to live in other people’s heads, where they can be shared again and again.

In this way, I can set off a single light in response to what light was given to me, and from that, it can emit outward, becoming an unstopable cascade of waving, pulsating lights in the minds of others all resonating with one another.

We’re all neurons.

[edit: okay, maybe we’re a LOT more than just neurons, but the fact that neural complexity is as complex as it is is still amazing to me]