OK, first forget what I've told you about Straylight. It's changed, and it's changed a lot
. Not to worry about the culture... it never had much of that, aside "it's the geeky place" and "it's the wet place" there's really very little that I ever wrote about Straylight. This document aims secondarily to be a guide for any later efforts in roleplaying that take place in Straylight, and primarily to be interesting and entertaining itself.
So, first, to shock you guys into reading this... the dolphins are gone. OK, no, not really. They aren't gone. Now stop panicking, OK
? They're out of the spotlight, though, for two reasons: First, I'm not the addict I used to be. It's a long time since I read
Startide Rising and almost as long since the last time I was interested in roleplaying a dolphin. Yes, that means that just out of respect for my sanity, you guys might want to stop calling me a delphinophile. Second, Straylight itself has matured a lot in my head and the society I have in mind really is a human one. I'm not going to add anything to it that doesn't sound like a good idea.
Some things stay, of course. The infeasibility stays - I'm not out to create a particularly likely society, and not even a terribly well thought-out one, simply one that could in my uneducated opinion work in at least some way and that sounds as cool as possible to me. Keep your disbelief suspended and you might enjoy it. The geekiness stays, too - Straylight seems to be known as the "Linux fiefdom", and I'm not going to drive anyone away with my cultural exploits. Straylightian culture will be quite separate from Straylightian tech support. Note, however, that the culture itself might well be quite geeky...
Also, of course, the maritimeness <FIXME> stays. Straylight is in the sea and its only land claims are the small islands in its area that nobody else can be bothered to claim.
The creation of modern Straylight began in one of the last years of the stable rule of Kaiser Wyltheow I, 1743 ASC. This is the year when the undersea laboratory city
Incremental Search was built in the minor Issenna basin, between the Aracic isles and mainland Kildare. As the finishing touches were put in, the geodesic dome of Incremental Search housed two hundred people, most of them scientific staff working for the Shirithian navy. Incremental Search was an unexpected success: It never exceeded its allocated budget or deadline, and the result was exactly what was asked for: A prototype installation of an undersea torpedo silo that would, if built in just a couple of dozen strategic places, make Shireroth basically invulnerable against any sort of naval attack.
The rational successor of Incremental Search, actual implementation of a network of torpedo silos, was left unrealised for now, as the turbulence of the ending of Wyltheow's reign made such a project impossible. In fact it wasn't until well into the time of Los II that anyone could get permission to do anything out of the ordinary in the sea anywhere near Yardistani waters. This was because the Yardistani navy had, for some reason, developed a reputation of being paranoid enough to blow to smithereens anything they could find on the sea that they didn't believe belonged there...
In 1780 ASC Kaiser Los II had finally managed to calm the military down enough that talk began behind closed doors about resuming the project and beginning the building of the so-called
k + 1 defense system. k + 1 was a very ambitious project and, despite the best efforts of the most paranoid of Shirithian officers, knowledge of it started leaking to the public. The complete plans to the building of Incremental Search were soon in wide distribution by means of samizdat, and the locations of many of the unfinished torpedo bases became common knowledge. There was much public controversy but little actual action...
... until an insurgency in Sargassum, a base very near Novi Nigrad. It was manned mostly by military personnel and engineers from Yardistan, and none of the crew felt terribly loyal to the feudal government. Since they were quite fed up with what they saw as a useless project to waste taxpayer money, they did what any good Yardistani would do, and rebelled. Their main weapon was, of course, the torpedo silos. The insurgents demonstrated their their power by blowing up quite a few things - almost everything they could find that could be blown up by torpedoes, except, of course, manned civilian ships.
The crew of Sargassum managed to hold Novi Nigrad hostage for a long time through skillful diplomacy that made them seem more threatening than they actually were. This encouraged other bases to join in the rebellion It turned out that it was no trivial task for the imperial government to conquer or even destroy a system of dozens of bases that it had itself designed to withstand external attacks for an indefinitely long time. The rebellion soon got an official face as it became known as the Federation of Yardistanis Under Pressure (they were all fans of David Bowie and Queen) and it began work towards its original goal, scrapping the k + 1 defense system and using the technology and infrastructure built in it for better purposes.
It was not until a whole year of war of mutual attrition had passed that the Shirithian government finally gave in. On the anniversary of the rebellion, a peace treaty was passed that allowed the FoYUP to use the bases for private enterprise and actually try to be productive members of society. The rest of Shireroth would finally get to breathe a sigh of relief as they were assured that their ships would be safe on the seas, at least from their own people. This treaty wasn't particularly well liked, and while some Shirithians were very bitter toward the FoYUP, just as many were impressed by its ability to beat even such a force as the Imperial Government.
The mentioned private enterprise quickly became popular, as many FoYUPians realised that if they wanted to regain the trust of the rest of Shireroth, they'd better become very useful very soon. Vacation resorts sprung up all around, despite the fact that what spaces they worked in tended to be rather cramped and spartan. In some places the seafloor's rich sediments were mined, a couple of bases originally meant to be "the last line of defense" near Yardistan's southern coast were repurposed for kelp farming. Even Incremental Search itself was turned into a museum of sorts, for showcasing the history of k + 1.
All this popularity posed problems, however: Soon a lot more people wanted to move in to the FoYUP from all around Shireroth than any of the bases had space for. The federation was not yet financially ready to start building new seafloor bases of any useful size. This caused the quality of life - which was already a lot lower under the sea than most people thought it was - to become even worse, and in general despite all of the celebration about how cool the sea was, most people there were rather miserable as they were packed under small domes with fluorescent lighting and thousands of other people in a very small space.
The solution to this problem was invented by an eccentric artist/architect Dante McCallavre. He pioneered the idea of the Sanct, or as it's more mundanely called, the floating city. It would be a majestic place to live in: A group of tetrahedronal spires supported dozens of meters above sea level (and therefore well above even the highest waves that could ever appear on the high seas). It would provide more than enough living space for anyone on the surface of the tetrahedrons. It would be just as close to the wealth of the sea as the seafloor bases. Despite all that, with a modular architecture, it could be cheaply built piece by piece wherever it's most convenient and the parts towed to one place over time to slowly form a growing city.
The first city planned by McCallavre was named
Straylight Sanct, after the duchy whose center was found to have been in the same place in studies of history. The city was a success, drawing almost five thousand citizens - much more than any other city in the FoYUP had housed before - within only a couple of years. The name was an even greater success, since many bases in the FoYUP already housed a significant non-Yardistani minority who didn't really like being called Yardistani.
As decades passed, business in the growing network of Sancts flourished, and the sea attracted even more people. In the turmoil caused by the prospering of the Barony of Amity and Mirioth and the feodal leaders' fight over Yardistan's status, Straylight was noticed and considered important enough to be a barony of its own.
There's still much to write... too much, I think
. I'll try to develop the Sancts and the Fuller Web a bit further first... they're the one part that I think someone other than I could find interesting
.
Straylightian English
Yes, as any good Shirithian subdivision does, Straylight has its own language, too. It's not a terribly complex one, but complex enough that it'll probably stay in the "under construction" phase for quite a while. I'm not a linquist, I hardly even dabble in that art.
The basic idea of Straylightian English is that it is English, but it makes sense. Making a language make sense is achieved by patching up holes and removing inconsistencies. A few things I've planned:
- Add genderless pronouns. This should be quite familiar to Shirithians.
- Add a way to tell the singular and plural of "you" apart. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out how this was handled in Middle English and import from it if that makes sense..
- Make verb inflection more consistent, preferably by removing the inconsistent case of the third person singular. In Straylightian English, I do, thou do, zie do, we do, you do, and they do - no inflection is needed.
- Allow the use of the word "not" to negate sentences without needing an auxiliary verb, so, for instance a Straylightian could quite well say "I like not coffee".
- Make quoting make sense. The inside of a quoted sentence should never be mutilated by quotation, no matter how tempting it might seem to an English speaker to put a comma or a period at the end of it. The exact details of punctuation will have to be worked out...
- Make the orthography consistent and simple. This change doesn't affect spoken Straylightian English at all, but to the written form it's magnitudes greater than the change caused by all of the others points combined. Correspondingly, it's also going to be the most difficult part. Would anyone happen to know about any projects to seriously improve the orthography of English? I might learn a lot from other people's efforts...
The Sancts
http://www.cjfearnley.com/fuller-faq-5.html#ss5.6
Straylightian minority religions
Although Straylight is dominated by Cedrism and traditional Yardistani religions, there are a few small religions that were founded in Straylight and that are rather popular there despite not being known of elsewhere. The largest of them is Simulationism, whose various sects are taught about in Straylightian schools. A more minor one is the occultistic Guruism, which is really not so much an organized religion as a method of self-improvement through means that can only be called magical. There are also various small sects of Simulationism that can only arguably be called religions by their own right.
Simulationism, in general, is the belief that the world is a simulation created by any race that is either capable of simulating a planetful of people in something that looks like a completely acceptable reality to the minds in the simulation. The most common school of thought is that this higher race consists of humans similar to those living in Straylight and all around Micras, using computers to simulate this complete world and all of its inhabitants with at least a certain minimum accuracy. Pretty much each part of the doctrine is under constant dispute, though: Some believe that there's no reason to think the simulator race is anything like humans, somebelieve that the laws of nature of the simulator race's world are completely different from those on Micras, some believe that only a specific set of people, perhaps just one, has an actual mind of zir own, and everyone else is just a mindless metaphysical zombie, etc..
One thing that all different divisions of Simulationism have in common is their attitude. Basically every simulationist realises that there is, in fact, nothing
wrong or undignified about not being "real". The reason is obvious and practical as long as Simulationism stays a mere religion - that is, as long as there actually is no evidence that the world Straylightians live in really is a simulation. Opinions differ on what should be done if such proof actually were found. The traditional way of thinking, advocated by the creators of the religion, is that if such a thing happened, it would be our duty to learn whatever we can about the world running us, while being mindful of the very real possibility that that world is simulated, too. Lately, however, the popular way of thinking has been one of humility - i.e. that it would probably be destructive for parts of a simulation to try to "reach out" outside of it, and therefore any attempt to do so should be stopped if at all possible.
The moral teachings of Simulationism vary widely depending on what sect is in question. The most commonly accepted doctrine considers all of the world's people to have been "created equal" - as a part of the simulation, and as a unit that consumes processing power just like everyone else does. This leads to a simple sort of soft morality: Since there seems to be no reason why one person should be inherently better than any other, perhaps it might be a good idea for people to try to just get along. A much stricter form of moral, in fact something that could be called moralism, stems from the idea that the world's creators probably didn't want people to fight amongst each other, so the sanctity of all people and an orderly society should be preserved. On the very liberal (Americans: libertarian) end of the spectrum there's the idea that there's only one person in the simulation with actual thoughts and everyone else is just a metaphysical zombie: This tends to allow people to get the idea that since they obviously have thoughts of their own, they are that zombie, and therefore can do anything at all they want to everyone else, because nobody else is a conscious being.
Most simulationists see people as actual simulated minds, running along with everything else in the universe inside some computer-equivalent. Some, on the other hand, think that their body-equivalents and brain-equivalents actually do exist in the world of the simulators, but are fed a stream of sense data to make up the simulation, Matrix-style. Some see the simula
The teachings of Simulationism vary on afterlife too, of course. The general idea is obvious: If there is an afterlife, it's either a simulated world created by the race running the simulation (perhaps the same one, although Simulationists tend to be wary of the idea of soul that defines a person even without zir body and memories) or the world of the race running the simulation. There is, obviously, no way to be absolutely certain of the difference, but then again that doesn't matter *yet* since one can only find out about it after death. That is if afterlife is defined as what comes after death -
Guruism is practised in few Sancts, but where it is practised it is quite common. The center of its "worship" is in the sanct where its creator lived, christened as Touchshriek but known by Guruists as init (yes, it is written in all lowercase). Guruism is also popular in Deep Trouble, Gensym, Yobi-Yibou and the secretive Petrovna, with differently themed sects based in each of the cities. Guruists use various kinds of magic rituals to learn things about their lives or affect things. Some of these are:
- A* Search
- Onion routing
- Quine alphabeticisation
- Hindley-Milner Type Inference:
- Burrows-Wheeler block sorting
- Lempel-Ziv-Welch <FIXME> coding
The pods of intelligent dolphins in Straylight:
- Salomon pod: The most revered, and certainly mysterious, the Salomon pod is rarely in contact with humans. As far as anyone knows, most individuals in the Salomon pod were born before ASC 1500, and no member of it has ever died of a natural cause.
- Nigaditzemloki pod: (Military)
- Harappa pod: (Historical importance?)
- Nietzsche pod
- Howard pod (how could one forget the intelligent dolphin from the Illuminatus! trilogy?)
- Lenin pod
- Creideiki pod
- Hawaii pod
- 5-1-7-4 pod
- Ulf pod
(more to come, writeups on these pods to be made)
Straylight
Straylight is a subdivision of Yardistan. You already knew that, didn't you? Well, in fact you didn't. Not the way you should know it. It's not just governmental. If it were, nobody here would bother to acknowledge the relationship anyway. It's much more than that. Straylightians are, in essence, Yardistani. The longest living all-Straylightian family goes back only four generations; Before that, it had come from Yardistan, like pretty much any
epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydelläänsäkään
Straylight ei kuulu Yardistanin alle ainoastaan hallinnollisesti. Suurin osa sen asukkaista on nimittäin Yardistanilaisten perillisiä, Geenien mukana Straylightiin on kulkeutunut myös vapaa asenne kaikkia elämänmtapoja ja -muotoja kohtaan. Straylight on kuitenkin siitä erilainen kuin isäntäherttuakuntansa, että täällä yhteiskunnalla on tapana pysyä jonkinlaisessa järjestyksessä jo ilman valtionhallinnon pitämää kontrollia, lähinnä siksi, että Straylightin kansalaiset itse haluavat pitää elämässään edes jonkinlaista varmuutta. Epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydelläänsäkään he eivät tietenkään...
Straylightian primer
Straylight is light where no light should be. It is not the light that shows the hardships of the poor to the people, though that light is important. It is not the light upon horrors that brings visible what would have frightened people less had it stayed unknown. It is not the light that shines unjustly upon criminals and fraudsters, reassuring them their fortune is in some way justified. Straylight is the light that seems physically impossible, the light that reflects and refracts at strange angles inside twisted structures until nobody can track its origin. Straylight is also the light of the mind, of the unpredictable turns of conscious and subconscious thought, of the myriad levels of complexity between neurons and the emergent symbolic thought in their interactions.
Straylight's cities are hard to describe as such. Big jumbled messes is much better a name. Straylightians live on the bottom of the sea, inside pontoons, dozens of meters over the surface of the sea, everywhere where nobody else lives. Each of thentilation and of keeping essentially all structures watertight, governed by essentially no rules. Entrepreneurs and charlatans, hermits and the gregarious, engineers and luddites are all drawn to Straylight, all for their own reasons. The sea doesn't offer vast wealth, but it does offer an almost unrestrained environment for individual expression and enterprise.
Most of the cities of Straylight are floating, coastal ones, located in the protection of inlets primarily near Yardistan, but also Amity and Mirioth, some areas of Brookshire and Kildare, plus one at Vanaheim in the north. As cities go, the ones in Straylight aren't particularly populous. The largest few house about a hundred thousand people, but most have barely over ten thousand citizens. Cities floating on the high seas, called
Sancts, are mostly only a couple of thousand citizens in size, though Straylightians do still consider them real cities instead of just villages. The smallest "cities" in Straylight are the sea-bottom bases, of which the biggest one is the permanent residence of eight hundred people.
Finding a source of livelihood on the sea is not as hard as it seems. A preciously small percentage of the locals do any sort of primary production. This consists of several sorts of mariculture. The most popular one is, of course, fishing and cultivation of fish. Farming of kelp, algae and plankton is also practised to some degree. Rarer still is whaling and cultivation of shellfish and oyster. Some with access to lots of resources and technology "mine" metals like magnesium out of the sea water - it isn't a very profitable industry, but it does work. Beyond that, Straylightians live in rather similar ways to citizens of other modern nations. The service sector is larger than the rest of all of the trades combined. Some heavy industries like metallurgy are constrained by buoyancy, which makes the barony more dependent on the outside for its ships and building materials than it would prefer to be. Expectably, some modern industries like biotechnology and IT are disproportionately big, although not so much so that the economic fate of the barony would depend on them.
NAMES AND ULTRA-CONDENSED CONCEPTS
- Pohjankaupunki: Yeah, it's a lame Finnish name that means simply "city of the bottom" but hey, it doesn't have any umlauts so people won't suspect anything
. Pohjankaupunki is in the bottom of the sea, not so far from the coast of Yardistan. It's not the most impressive of all of the Straylightian projects, being essentially just a traditional city on the bottom of the sea... but I kinda had to create it because of that image of Shyriath's
- Triton: Name for the cities that float on water. Straylightian Tritons are predominantly deep-sea ones, though it wouldn't be an impossibility to build some protected ones on, say, the coast of Yardistan, or on the coast of Kildare or mainland Shireroth. A Triton consists of an upper and lower part, where the upper part is for good living and the lower part more for maintenance (you're essentially living in pontoons there).
- Fuller Web: This used to be called Atlantis Web initially, but then I learned about all of the cool stuff done by Buckminster Fuller that relates to this... and since the name Buckminster Web would be a bit *too* obvious, this is what I'm using instead.
OK... this'll be separated in two documents, an "outside" explanation and an "inside" description. The explanation is shorter, more compact and hopefully *less* interesting than the description. I'm going to use this duality to illustrate the interesting way we go about role-playing and generally living in micronations. Some information is basically the same, whether you look at it from the outside or the inside - but some things like, say, the source of the name, are quite different. If you didn't understand this paragraph, just read on and you'll understand it.
EXPLANATION OF STRAYLIGHT
Some people still don't know where the name comes from. Pitiful... well, OK, not really. You can't expect absolutely everyone to have read Good Books. Only the best of us
. The name comes from the orbital residence
Villa Straylight described in the science fiction novel
Neuromancer by William Gibson. It's a long while since I read it, but interestingly I seem to have tended to select the same sorts of unique tidbits to build the barony of as the Villa consisted of. Perhaps it's just that I remember the book subconsciously (I could hardly explain the plot, or the structure of the Villa now - my memory doesn't go back that many years with perfect clarity), or perhaps - if I understood the passage I'm going to quote properly - it's some sort of a necessary consequence of a mind that works the way that mine does...
They floated in the center of a perfectly square room, walls and ceiling paneled in rectangular sections of dark wood. The floor was covered by a single square of brilliant carpet patterned after a microchip, circuits traced in blue and scarlet wool. In the exact center of the room, aligned precisely with the carpet pattern, stood a square pedestal of frosted white glass. "The Villa Straylight," said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, "is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves..."
"Essay of 3Jane's," the Finn said, producing his Partagas.
"Wrote that when she was twelve. Semiotics course."
"The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the banal precision of furniture in a hotel room. In Straylight, the hull's inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan's corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man's hand. The bright crabs burrow there, the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage."
"That was her you saw in the restaurant," the Finn said. "By the standards of the archipelago," the head continued, "ours is an old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting that age. But reflecting something else as well. The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull.
It works out to be interestingly similar to two important structures of Straylight, created in different times: The Straylight Reef, probably less remembered by people than it really should be, and the Web. Both of them are full of unnecessarily complicated structures, twisting and turning surfaces with as many facets as a human brain has. The former, for the benefit of those who don't remember it, is written to be a complex structure of bright corals, creating an unnecessary and, in nature, very unlikely complex of colourful, almost reflective caves. The latter is a design
DESCRIPTION OF STRAYLIGHT
Some of you don't remember where the name of the Barony of Straylight comes from.
