Thursday, November 13, 2014

The nomad

Aesthetic:  Steampunk meets cyberpunk meets post-apocalyptic hippie tribalism.  Style is pragmatic; every piece of jewelry, adornment, etc. has a purpose.  Many wrappy, tattered layers.  See pinterest.

I'd like to give him some rudimentary chemistry and/or medicinal knowledge and skills.

Name:  Damon is an anagram for nomad.  Andariego = Spanish for wanderer.  Girovago = Italian for rover.

Damon and Pythias, Greek myth

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Rewilding Witchcraft

Rewilding Witchcraft, Scarlet Imprint

we begin with wolves. ... The apex predator was shown to be the vital element in biodiversity. Man is the only exception to this rule.

I once reasoned that, in a long slow decline of living standards, witchcraft as a low tech, local response could perhaps survive the coming storm and that hand in hand with rewilding habitats as re-enchanted sacred spaces it offered the potential for a post-industrial recovery of bio-diversity.

Now everything has changed.

Rewilding is alas the final position of an ecological movement facing catastrophic losses. ... Yet the essential failure of rewilding is this: we cannot simply introduce new predators, or species such as bison or beavers, into small isolated environments whilst industrial culture is destroying the entire matrix of life on the planet. ... I am not suggesting quitting. ... These small victories will make a difference as we approach the choke point and particularly for those who have or choose, in spite of the facts, to have children.

with climate change animals and insects are being born out of sync with their food sources. As I have said before, the wheel of the year has been broken. 

For witchcraft to be anything other than the empty escapism of the socially dysfunctional or nostalgia for bygone ages, it needs to feel the shape of its skull, venerate the dead and the sacred art of living and dying with meaning.

Orientation, Presence, Imperative. We are not simply losing it all, it is being stripped from us as surely as those accused of being witches were by their inquisitors in the torture cell. ... The witch has been created by the land to speak and act for it.

However, I predict the next generation are going to be angrier and their witchcraft more radical than you or I could dream. They will realise that there is nothing to lose, rather than this generation which seems concerned only about the size of their pension pots – not the fact that they have cost us all the earth.

These technological and scientific responses do not account for the wider environment which we do not control, but which now seeks to redress the killing balance and is doing so with storm surge and wildfire and tornado and flood and drought regardless of what is playing on your headphones or how high the gates are to your compound. I welcome this storm.

a shift to the local and a disengagement from power structures are necessary steps. Find the others has become an imperative.

Monday, July 14, 2014

Mythology of resilience sandbox 2

As I'm sketching out this vision of the future, I'm using energy per capita (EPC) as a basic budget for running the apparatus of economy, governance, culture, etc.  Now, I have no way to tell yet whether this will be accurate, but I'm supposing that EPC peaks somewhere in the 2005-2025 crisis turning and follows a more or less symmetrical decline from there.  The following forecast from peakoil.com shows a more drastic, sharp decline following peak.  I'm not sure my future's quite as dramatic as all that.



Now, the stories being told won't really be detailing the technical ins and outs of this energy budget.  Narrator(s) and characters may or not be aware of this reality underlying that of their day-to-day, but the sorts of technologies, economies, etc. available will be a manifestation of the limits imposed by the energy budget.

Note that declining energy per capita doesn't necessarily mean that everyone on the planet will necessarily adopt a lower-energy lifestyle.  There will be winners and losers.  There will be hoarders.  There will be centers of high tech whizbangery and swaths of no places, rewilding ruins of modernity and industrialization, and everything in between.  That is, there's a place in these stories for patches of civilization that continue research in AI, drone warfare, virtual worlds, genetic engineering, whatever technograndiose fantasy you wish.  Kurzweil's singularity may exist in a heavily guarded compound in this world.  That said, in a world with falling EPC, if these high tech, high energy processes proceed, it can only mean greater stratification between the energy haves and have nots.  Further, energy sources will play a part globally.  USA's well past its own oil production peak (1970) today, and geopolitics can play out in a number of ways.  Wealth and income distribution will follow energy distribution, and that's where you derive your divide between walled, shining cities from the squalid, earthy lands of barbarians.  For my part, I want to primarily tell the stories of the barbarians.

I'm not sure I want this to be a class struggle story, a proletarian revolution.

Looping back to "everything in between", I'm interested in exploring what it looks like when you start dismantling what remains of industrial civilization and bring it closer to earth.

Besides the EPC component, I'm using Strauss and Howe's saeculum and generational archetypes as a template for the cycle of stories.  As mentioned, they're calling for crisis in 2005-2025ish, and as I turn the wheel forward, I'd like to pick up the narrative roughly 2065, in an unraveling period.

2065-2085, Unraveling
EPC ~  1945-1965, similar EPC to postwar boom
Artist entering elderhood
Prophet entering middle age
Nomad entering young adulthood
Hero entering childhood

2085-2105, Crisis
EPC ~ 1925-1945, pre-petroleum boom equivalent, post-suburban
Prophet
Nomad
Hero
Artist

2105-2125, High
EPC ~ 1905-1925
Nomad
Hero
Artist
Prophet

2125-2145, Awakening
EPC ~ 1885-1905
Hero
Artist
Prophet
Nomad

Great prophet myths emerge from awakenings with aging heroes.  This is a spiritual and cultural awakening, led by the great prophet character.

2145-2165, Unraveling
EPC ~ 1865-1885
Artist
Prophet
Nomad
Hero


The more I play with this layout, the more I want to start the stories in 2125, during the awakening.  It may not matter when they start.  I'm not sure I want to reveal them in a linear, chronological fashion.  Maybe I'd like to write books, but I'd like to incorporate multimedia, alternate reality gaming into the storytelling.  The stories may be told as dispatches from the future, scattered in various ways across the landscape and current media.

A band of barbarians reaches the white tower of singularity and broadcasts their message of hope to the faithful in the past.  Kurzweil's ilk began building the infrastructure for cross-temporal communication long before they had the means to use it.  The techno elite use this to market to the past to plump up current investments.  Hackers use this to leave breadcrumbs on another path.  Maybe.  Regardless, I think I've got my factions.  See Atlantis, The Institute.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

The prophetess

Beatrice Moon was the initial inspiration for the prophetess character.

Miriam
Exodus 15:20-21
20 Then Miriam the prophetess, Aaron's sister, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women followed her, with tambourines and dancing. 21 Miriam sang to them: "Sing to the LORD, for he is highly exalted. The horse and its rider he has hurled into the sea."
Possible tie in to Atlantis mythology?  Hurled into the sea?

Exodus 2:  Miriam watches as Pharaoh's daughter discovers Moses, and suggests a Hebrew nurse.

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

The Insitute

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2386327/

Flyers in streets
Message with invitation to suite, "To those dark horses with the spirit to look up and see... a recondite family awaits."
Physical place, get a key, instructions to multimedia room
Socio-reengineering, expand trust, leader identified, advanced voodoo tech, algorithm . . . mathematical code that will bring world peace
You will feel the divine.
Temptation, forbidden fruit, induction card, become a spy
Scavenger hunt, unanswered questions
New terminology
No distinction between real and fake insanity
The world looked like a different place, with a different purpose, I was looking for clues
Text message, radio station, email
Assemble a group, choose a leader, confrontation, victory, handshake, then cessation of contact
Rabbit hole, magic key, story box, wonder & discovery . . . Why is it contained within the walls of this little park?
There should be this kind of play infused into the architecture of our real world.
People will accept a billboard, but be upset by street art.
Use multimedia to tell a story.
Urban playground movement, alternate reality game
Giving people a mission and permission to be an agent, explore & discover the hidden, spontaneity and play in civic spaces
Blurring absurd & real
Rogue participant rewrites rules of the game, not a game, abandons experience, recluse, paranoid, experience was "spiritually harmful"
Elsewhere Public Works Agency vs. Jejune Institute (goons)
Elsewhere & Eva
Cell call from commander, mission, codewords, dance in public, physical jamming, joined by b boy and sasquatch
CD with hidden track, walking tour narrated by mother and daughter, Eva
History, fairy dwellings, comments on utility boxes, descriptions of abandoned, demolished houses, book in bookstore, esoteric, box with secret diary of missing Eva, transcendent and ephemeral
Home videos of Eva, cuts her own hair, reads her sad poetry from the diary
Eva suggested potential to transform world
Experience was to tell Eva's story, not just fun and games
SFPD witness recording (?) . . . night of Eva's disappearance . . . mystery
Eva's father . . . algorithm, real person with real house
Rescue Kelvin Williams, tunnels under streets of Berkley, chalked walls, crystal oscillator recovered underground to activate algorithm
Eva was a doorway to elsewhere
Group mailed postcard, directions, codewords, meet couple blocks from destination and walk there following ground markings, boombox, message from Eva, blindfolds, replace with trust
Covert ops, steal bioforce globe to destroy Jejune, prescreening for final event led by man in white coat, gadgets & instrumentation, questions pertaining to dreams, deja vu
Images, word slideshow set to music
Seminar: guru type welcome, protege of Jejune master, glasses of hot water (drink the kool-aid), guru urges retrieval of bioforce globes, creates resistance, "That's how we make tea." laugh, dance, parachute, videoconference with dolphin, emergence of leader of institute, talks about nature of the game/reality, reminds of the promises at induction, fulfilled.
Stopped short
The book was good, but the ending was weird.
Maybe if you don't look down, you'll never fall (referencing Wile E. Coyote)
Elsewhere, a way of being and playing in the world that changed everything.  Powerful & enchanting
Creator & Eva meditated and travelled to elsewhere during creator's treatment
It could still be happening, as far as I know the war is still being waged in the streets
Underlying messages were real
There is all this amazing stuff happening, having something to believe in

I don't know if Eva is a real person or a character.
I don't know if Kelvin Williams is a real person or a character.
Blair Lucien real or not?