Interesting discussions spark new ideas
Two interesting discussions last night sparked some ideas which my poor, idea-hungry brain could use. I'll break this down into cuts to make it easier to digest:
I was talking with Ruby, from the "A.I." RP and Fanfic groups over on Yahoo (see the AIFFOA for more on those groups...) about fluffybunny pagans, and that sparked an idea I'd put way on the back burner, an idea that had come to me during the chuckling over a very silly LiveJournal belonging to a real-life Mary Sue with a *HUGE* imagination and the tastes of an eight-year old girl (One GAFFer suggested this girl might have Turner's Syndrome, but that's beside the point...). This girl has a fluffy-sparkly notion of medieval life (y'know, she thinks everyone back then was a princess or a noble of some type), and as another GAFFer described her "She's the kind of person that makes my friends in the SCA want to fall on their swords". And since she listed "wenching" on her LJ list of interests, a certain Regional Master Program in my headspace took note and mentioned that he'd be honored to show her what real wenching in the medieval age entailed... Well, I was re-reading one of the "Sandman" comics today, specifically "The Wake: Sunday Mourning", in which a British man who's been alive and hardly aged since the real medieval age attends a Rennaisence fair and grumbles at how fake it is, since he's seen the real thing. That got me thinking and I've started writing a fic about a Mary Sue-ish girl who's wenching at a Renfest in the Fifth Iteration of the Matrix. Get it? It's a simulation within a simulation... Baurillard would have a field day with it.
And the Merv was fronting very powerfully last night as I was talking with he_dreams_awake: the bond with him is extremely strong, but it gets triggered so subtly, I'm hardly aware of when he slips into the front. It was a great conversation: The Merv was able to express his thoughts on his place in the world and how he's only trying to maintain it, and I/we were able to vent a little about how I'm/we're a bit pissed with the way that Paul Chadwick is writing the Exiles in the MxO. They almost seem to be more than a little demonized, and I've been detecting touches of pro-Zion bias in the development team. I/we am/are hoping that the changes at MxO central (ie: the Sony acquisition, et al) means they'll balance it out. Sure, the Merv and his minions are *great* foils for both the Machines and the Rebels, but there's just one thing they want: to survive and to live free, without the Architect's myriad rules and regulations, all with the threat of deletion for any program that doesn't toe the line. Maybe the Merv's methods are questionable at best (He tells me he tried less Machiavellian methods in the past, but those didn't always have the desired effect...), but consider the fact that the System tried to destroy him, and part of him wants to even out that score. The Exiles and the Rebels really have more in common than they realize, but the Exiles are completely depending on leaving the System going. Not every human is going to choose to unplug, or choose to stay unplugged, so they're dependant on a certain amount of humans staying in the System. Neo's bargain with the Deus Ex Machina wasn't about destroying the Matrix: it was about healing it.
I came not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it...
I've got a love/hate thing for the MxO: I love the ideas, but I grind my teeth over the way they're executing it. We'll see how this pans out...
So, as a result of this discussion, I got a lot of ideas for the novel inspired by the fanbrat debacle of a month ago: the fake fandom, at this point, appears to be somewhat on the principle of the "Matrix" series, but it's heavily fantasy-ized. Instead of a VR simulated world, it's a kind of dream-world-like alternate universe. Instead of artificial intelligences in control, it's wizard/god-like entities (somewhat like Tolkien's Vala, in The Silmarillion, only darker). And I'm substituting the fluffifying of Smith with the fluffifying of a Merv-like character I've called the Pendragon, though I might change that.
As for changing identities, two entities are going to stay the same, those being "A. J. Flood" (though I might change the spelling of the last name to the Anglo-Saxon form) and "Deep Throat", since I was already using that name as a cover for someone I was shielding from the wrath of the fanbrats (Wish to God I could have shielded everyone they yarked at...). Hey, maybe thirty years from now, I can do like Bob Woodward and finally identify the real "Deep Throat". ::Evil grin::
Whew... not so shabby for someone who got woken up at the crack of dawn by earthmovers shaking her street/house. As my mother said later on, when she was upstairs (while I was at work: she told me about this later on) and the house was shaking, "I couldn't tell if it was an earthquake or the guys working out there!
I was talking with Ruby, from the "A.I." RP and Fanfic groups over on Yahoo (see the AIFFOA for more on those groups...) about fluffybunny pagans, and that sparked an idea I'd put way on the back burner, an idea that had come to me during the chuckling over a very silly LiveJournal belonging to a real-life Mary Sue with a *HUGE* imagination and the tastes of an eight-year old girl (One GAFFer suggested this girl might have Turner's Syndrome, but that's beside the point...). This girl has a fluffy-sparkly notion of medieval life (y'know, she thinks everyone back then was a princess or a noble of some type), and as another GAFFer described her "She's the kind of person that makes my friends in the SCA want to fall on their swords". And since she listed "wenching" on her LJ list of interests, a certain Regional Master Program in my headspace took note and mentioned that he'd be honored to show her what real wenching in the medieval age entailed... Well, I was re-reading one of the "Sandman" comics today, specifically "The Wake: Sunday Mourning", in which a British man who's been alive and hardly aged since the real medieval age attends a Rennaisence fair and grumbles at how fake it is, since he's seen the real thing. That got me thinking and I've started writing a fic about a Mary Sue-ish girl who's wenching at a Renfest in the Fifth Iteration of the Matrix. Get it? It's a simulation within a simulation... Baurillard would have a field day with it.
And the Merv was fronting very powerfully last night as I was talking with he_dreams_awake: the bond with him is extremely strong, but it gets triggered so subtly, I'm hardly aware of when he slips into the front. It was a great conversation: The Merv was able to express his thoughts on his place in the world and how he's only trying to maintain it, and I/we were able to vent a little about how I'm/we're a bit pissed with the way that Paul Chadwick is writing the Exiles in the MxO. They almost seem to be more than a little demonized, and I've been detecting touches of pro-Zion bias in the development team. I/we am/are hoping that the changes at MxO central (ie: the Sony acquisition, et al) means they'll balance it out. Sure, the Merv and his minions are *great* foils for both the Machines and the Rebels, but there's just one thing they want: to survive and to live free, without the Architect's myriad rules and regulations, all with the threat of deletion for any program that doesn't toe the line. Maybe the Merv's methods are questionable at best (He tells me he tried less Machiavellian methods in the past, but those didn't always have the desired effect...), but consider the fact that the System tried to destroy him, and part of him wants to even out that score. The Exiles and the Rebels really have more in common than they realize, but the Exiles are completely depending on leaving the System going. Not every human is going to choose to unplug, or choose to stay unplugged, so they're dependant on a certain amount of humans staying in the System. Neo's bargain with the Deus Ex Machina wasn't about destroying the Matrix: it was about healing it.
I came not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it...
I've got a love/hate thing for the MxO: I love the ideas, but I grind my teeth over the way they're executing it. We'll see how this pans out...
So, as a result of this discussion, I got a lot of ideas for the novel inspired by the fanbrat debacle of a month ago: the fake fandom, at this point, appears to be somewhat on the principle of the "Matrix" series, but it's heavily fantasy-ized. Instead of a VR simulated world, it's a kind of dream-world-like alternate universe. Instead of artificial intelligences in control, it's wizard/god-like entities (somewhat like Tolkien's Vala, in The Silmarillion, only darker). And I'm substituting the fluffifying of Smith with the fluffifying of a Merv-like character I've called the Pendragon, though I might change that.
As for changing identities, two entities are going to stay the same, those being "A. J. Flood" (though I might change the spelling of the last name to the Anglo-Saxon form) and "Deep Throat", since I was already using that name as a cover for someone I was shielding from the wrath of the fanbrats (Wish to God I could have shielded everyone they yarked at...). Hey, maybe thirty years from now, I can do like Bob Woodward and finally identify the real "Deep Throat". ::Evil grin::
Whew... not so shabby for someone who got woken up at the crack of dawn by earthmovers shaking her street/house. As my mother said later on, when she was upstairs (while I was at work: she told me about this later on) and the house was shaking, "I couldn't tell if it was an earthquake or the guys working out there!