Blavatsky

[Liam conToketi]

I see you've started work on the Wiki for it, and I am very intrigued by what you have put forward. And while it is yet to be completed, I feel I must inquire about the Ashpool Theory. While I am a physics minor (no clue if that would help or not, but it seem to fit some), I am having a hard time understanding the concepts of "attachment" and "paradigm". You say that they have different values in different places, but I don't understand what they are and what those differences affect...

[Ari Rahikkala]

Well, to be honest, I'm not happy with it so far and it's likely it's going to have to change. Basically, though, like I solved two problems in Straylight (and, I believe, helped myself find solutions for a bunch more) with the Hunter-Seeker, I'm trying to make a solution out of this for a whole bunch of problems... you could imagine them as forces that I try to find a stable balance for. Here's some of the forces acting here (others might be incorporated later, some might be left out, depending on what solution I come up with):

Firstly and most importantly, I want to codify - without making anything too systematic - the concept of, er, reality meltdown. It's kind of difficult to find a name for it. It's that moment, or period of time, when things just stop making sense. It's usually brought about by things like the sudden return of magic, or Hell on Earth, or things suddenly existing in something else than the geometry we're used to, or the Internet getting mixed up with reality, or... basically, any way that everything suddenly becomes all alien and strange.

Now this is obviously a space of possible effects. For instance with mild demonic background activity, you get things like ghostly whispers you can just barely hear, maybe the occasional bleeding wall or stigmata (or would that be a result of angelic activity?), perhaps a faint smell of brimstone. Your everyday ghosts tend to come with a cold draft, showing up in cameras and such, whereas stronger ectoplasmic activity will manifest in possessions and poltergeists. Stranger (yet somehow so very common) effects might involve things like everyday items developing intents and goals and subtly behaving accordingly, all kinds of things becoming anthropomorphic, etc.. The only constant I seem to have found in all of this that when the going gets weird, it's best to beware mirrors. Seriously. You do not fuck with mirrors. I like making an issue out of that.

In the end, what I want out of this is a way to say quickly just *how* weird things are, and have a reason why I can tell this. It doesn't need to be very precise, but it'll probably have to actually be a number - in Straylight, if you can't quantify it, it's not really there! Blavatsky should be somewhere in the "mildly creepy but definitely unreal" part of the space - strange enough that while you can live there, you probably don't want to open unknown doors if you're not reasonably confident what's behind them (*), and the museums have strict rules against speaking ancient Laqi in front of their exhibits. It's not out of the question to have the occasional complete reality BSOD, though the results might be somewhat postmodern.


Secondly, well, Blavatsky *is* the... place of magic in Straylight. Well, actually, it's not magic the way I see it (if you want to hear me rant about how awful the way magic works in most games and such is, just get me drunk), but since I can't think of a significantly better word for it, and because you guys have already systematized it, I guess I have no choice... anyway, the system of magic here is fairly complex, and chances are it's going to be complex enough to be completely distinct from the theories of correspondence, but who knows? I might just be able to work in *some* connection... the current plan is to do a highly tongue-in-cheek one based on an extension of quantum bogodynamics and outrageously named spells. It's, uh, not going to make as much sense as the rest of Straylight...


Thirdly, there's the fact that Yvain is still waiting for me to come up with that "theory" I promised to replace these "telluric currents" of his... well, what I'm working on here is going to be that theory, even if the end result isn't actually the theory of correspondence.


Fourthly, I try to maintain some kind of coherency over time even with ideas that I've never published (it makes me feel I'm not wasting time with Straylight when there are few ideas I work on and then flatly reject - I try to either incorporate them into the world in some form, even if it takes years, or just forget them, in which case I won't be concerned about them anyway ). The problem here is that the original theory of correspondence never really was a coherent idea. It was basically my attempt to do the reality breakdown thing in as pure a way as possible - ignoring any specifics like demonic possession or aliens or such, what happens when reality just simply falls apart? I decided to start by considering the physical universe as an imperfect mirror of a quasi-Platonic "true universe", such that the quality of the mirror image might be affected by some aspect of some part of reality (maybe of the physical universe, maybe of the true universe, maybe something "in between" - if that's even meaningful, and I never got around to deciding whether it was!). As such, if the connection were to be weakened, progressively more unreal things would happen in the physical universe. Human minds would generally have something of an innate connection, so that complex human bodies would be able to keep functioning even if they had demons flying out of their noses.

Actually, come to think of it, this old theory of mine makes me significantly more happy than the new one... it's likely what I will end up will look more like this than what's currently on the Wiki...


(*) Icebreaker will understand what I mean when I say that some treacherously placed doors might just have nothing behind them...

[Liam conToketi]

...So...if I get this correctly...

1 is perfect correspondence with the real world. The farther you stray from 1, the more bizarre and seemingly impossible things happen in that area?

That long rant confused me mildly, but this is what I seemed to get from it...

[Ari Rahikkala]

Weeeelll.... I'm probably going to make the "usually used number" an index, actually, so that it "seems easy" for humans to use; something like 1 would be "everything's normal, nothing supernatural expected", and 5 maybe "computer programs hit timing bugs 70% more often, schizophrenics' teeth fillings actually make sounds", 9 would be something close to where Blavatsky is ("having very lifelike sculptures around considered ill-advised as they don't always remember to stay immobile")... and so on, going arbitrarily high, although of course you couldn't handle human life very well above some entirely arbitrary level that could be, for instance, 50. It's all somewhat frivolous, of course... this system does nothing to duplicate Yvain's ideas, for instance... but I like it...

[Ari Rahikkala]

Oh, and in case anyone's feeling apprehensive about this... I don't really intend to use this "theory" much... it's simply an idea that amuses me...