IFComp 07!
The 2007 Interactive Fiction Competition is open and the games have been released. I guess I ought to start playing them, with a twinge of regret that yet again I'm not among them. My own stupid bloody fault. I hate implementer's block. Lots of game ideas in my head, nothing that seems to gel. Or not enough time given to the hobby or something.
I walked around the streets tonight and found myself noticing how hard-wired my imagination is for 'heroic' interpretations of images. Which is to say: I walked past a park, saw an otherworldly glow and just had to go see what it was, even though I knew it was a streetlight shining on a cluster of trees next to a climbing frame. But they were Narnia trees, and the light was an eternal flame. Or at least out of the corner of my eyes it was.
I walked past the CityCare truck depot and the lights were on inside: stark blue-white fluorescents, vehicles and oil cans and hoists glowing under glass. And my imagination goes: robot exoskeletons in a five storey high spaceport.
It does this all the time. This, plus my painful sense of reality, is probably why I'm drawn to science fiction as a genre. I can't cope with things just being ordinary, but I need to be able to believe in them.
But an odd thing has been happening to science, since WWII. As technology expanded, the frontiers of science have been shrinking. Up to the 1930s, it seemed like science was all about finding whole new universes of possibility. Since the war, it seems to have been more about finding out - in great detail - what's NOT possible any more. No life on Mars, no life anywhere in the solar system (except maybe some bacteria on Jovian moons), no warp drive, no pocket atomics, no sentient computers. No WWIII, either, which overall is a net win.
That's where I get stuck. Where is there space left to dream? How can we even think, how can we live, without a frontier of some kind? But space isn't it, the ocean isn't it, the Net's just a big blog, and in our cities we're elbow to elbow with people we don't get along with.
If this is it, this is as good as it gets, why am I so dissatisfied?
October 5th, 2007 - 08:14
Remember the C.S.L. quote of 15.9.?
October 5th, 2007 - 16:00
“Space left to dream” ? What about the 4th dimension? Did you read that Moebius article by Rosen?
October 6th, 2007 - 14:47
Did you notice your longed for flying car has arrived. It ain’t no Jaguar, but a cross between a helicopter and a gogomobil. I would not step into a helicopter, I would not step into a gogomobil and especially not into a combination of both.
October 6th, 2007 - 19:21
For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me……………………………………………………………………………………………….Talking about flying: Two days ago I took a nap in the afternoon and upon awakening for once a piece of dream stayed with me: I was in a room with a balcony. Looking out the window there was nothing but blue sky and floating in it a bright, white bow kite. And I thought I have to go on the balcony and look at this kite…………..Nothing extraordinary, but the bow kite looked a lot like the Moebius ring at the bottom of the Rosen article. I’m not sure, if the article was finished, where it ended. Do you have that book by chance?
October 6th, 2007 - 19:33
And FICTION: from Latin fictio: Imaging, Forming………reshaping, enhancing, ELEVATING, superimposing beauty [hopefully] on something existing, because the existing dissatisfies. That’s how art comes about. Dissatisfaction with the existing surroundings. I never made much art in NZ. It is so beautiful, I felt no need for art. But in a stone jungle, a basement, an ugly apartment or subburb there it becomes a necessity. There one wants to move up and out and fly away.
October 6th, 2007 - 19:51
Woke up with a line this morning, which turned into a simple poem: I dedicate it to God, Air Nz, and someone else…………………………..It is called: YOU MADE ME FLY IN GODZONE [or: A Threefold Cord]………………I want to reach higher hight, I want to fly like a kite, please let me feel glory bright, I want to see You………..I want to climb up a tree, I want to be you and me, I want to be You. ………….You All in All it be, you and forever me, let it come true……………Rising from ashes free, there finally has to be, a life that is new!……………..This poem,or prayer probably has been written a thousand times before, but it does not matter. May everybody write it.
October 6th, 2007 - 20:11
Oh, and by the way, if it looks like “weird and creepy stuff” you may delete, for your sake, not mine. I’m beyond embarassment, at least today.
October 7th, 2007 - 04:44
Left a message : see “Miracles”
October 7th, 2007 - 13:45
Yeah, I’m sorry about that – I was out of line earlier, cranky and irritable and I apologise. I ought to know by now that gentleness suits me better than crankiness (and that I can’t separate my mystical side from my logical-rational side), but it seems like living like Jesus is a lot harder than learning who Jesus is.
““Space left to dreamâ€? ? What about the 4th dimension? Did you read that Moebius article by Rosen?”
I’m not sure who Rosen is and what article you’re referring to?
Einstein of course identified the 4th dimension rather prosaically with time, but I think the sense in which it is used by mystically-inclined people rather than working physicists or mathematicians is as a sort of catch-all term for ‘the spiritual aspect of our world’ – like ‘right-brain’ which we now know doesn’t have that much of a correlation with our creativity/intuition as was once thought. Heim figured that idea or spirit might be a fifth or sixth dimension. String theory guesses there are up to 12 dimensions but that none of them are spiritual. Relativity thinks that since no information can travel faster than light then prayer is impossible, and quantum physics… seems to mean different things to almost everyone who looks at it.
I do think that an honest appraisal of the spiritual is where science (and science fiction) needs to go in order to, well, get more inspiration. But knowing that we need to get there, and actually getting there are two separate things. And the road to there – whether we start from orthodox Christianity or secular science – leads through the somewhat scary forest called ‘New Age spirituality’. in which all sorts of beasties lurk.
“Did you notice your longed for flying car has arrived. It ain’t no Jaguar, but a cross between a helicopter and a gogomobil.”
Is that the Moller Skycar? I’ll be impressed if that thing ever gets sold…
I had to google for “gogomobil”. It’s something like a Volkswagen?
“I want to reach higher hight, I want to fly like a kite, please let me feel glory bright, I want to see You”
A mole, digging in a hole
Digging up my soul now
Going down, excavation
I and I in the sky
You make me feel like I can fly
So high
Elevation
(U2)
October 7th, 2007 - 14:55
What’s this with a mole? Are those your words or U2
October 7th, 2007 - 14:56
Article in Ground of Faith
October 7th, 2007 - 15:13
A gogomobil was a tiny 3wheeled car. I think the roof opened and you had to climb ot that way somehow. Not sure if it was for2 or one person only.
October 8th, 2007 - 11:00
“What’s this with a mole? Are those your words or U2″
That’s the lyrics to the recent U2 song, “Elevation”. One of my favourites.
“Article in Ground of Faith”
Ah.. I confess I haven’t actually read all of the GoF articles, despite having my name listed as webmaster.
October 8th, 2007 - 14:53
I and I is a Dylan song from 1983
October 8th, 2007 - 22:19
cautious: I got your emails, but I can’t seem to reply, I keep getting bounce messages. I’m not mad at you, just please take care of yourself.
October 9th, 2007 - 18:26
Just praying for someone, I understood the mole. It’s digging up 30years of frozen ground, like the little boy in the Grimm story.