Monday, September 30, 2013

Of Palomar’s Panel

As obsessed I am with making things under my control, I get easily worried about the scattering and dispersion. I don’t like not knowing where things are, and I don’t feel comfortable with having to take a long way to access these things that have to be of practical access.

I can become highly and obnoxiously methodic with everything in my life, and often I imagine systems of gauges and meters and buttons. It’s like I’m constantly trying to picture an interface for keeping up with life. Practically. Efficiently.

This idea of having a panel with all of my ideas is a very old one, and I’ve been giving it too many names over the years, but I think I’ll have this silly one (won’t explain it, ha). This is where I could store certain ideas regarding certain gaugings of the world, such as release and restraint, risk and reward or surplus and deficit.

This is one of the ideas that show so much potential, but also require a vast amount of dedication, and so this will likely become one of these great projects that I’ll add a few bricks every few months. Might not sound engaging, but I think this method might be the safest one, as desperate sprints wreck me in no time.


Of artificial mind-like systems

I always wonder if I can’t be considered a scientist just for the lack of a degree and because I’ve been avoiding articles and researches and have been doing my studies absolutely entirely on my own observations. But the academy doesn’t seem appealing to me anymore. I want to work with science in my own terms.

I am more liberal to the methods and I am more open to having fields being blended together. In fact, one of my magnathesis is exactly how all fields are more interconnected than they’re currently believed to. And then again, albeit slow, it’s not like I’m not getting anywhere,

By doing things differently I might get different results – that’s also one of my thesis, to try things under a new light. And I hope I can keep in my way to get them. Somehow I owe that to mankind in both ways – the progress we’ve achieved and damage that we’ve done.

I have to make some contribution in art and science and I think through philosophy of the mind and those sort of metathoughts I can help the way things are perceived. Also, it’s not just the human mind but I’m also considering how the artificial mind could work. For instance, the way artificial brains and programs could be arranged and engineered so that they can emulate the amazing cognitive power we have. And so the more we understand how our amazing brain works, this most marvelous tool we’ve got, it’ll be easier to recreate it artificially and improve machines themselves.

Ok, so this was me trying to get into the field of artificial intelligence and programming. Being such an amateur, I ask to be forgiven for such a short topic, but then again, this is how it all starts.

Of pelagic momentum of consciousness

Brick by brick, I’m slowly unravelling the true purpose of the quest I have in here. Not that I’d expect it to have one single objective, but I’m really tracing down the connections that all these little ideas have in common. And as I have once said, instead of finding a restricting definition of what I really want, I’m finding it to be quite rewarding as I’m discovering myself, and the sooner I get the hang of what has been tickling me, I feel more comfortable to chase down other ideas.

Anyway, as I’ve settled at the beginning of the year, I am longing to understand the creativity and the process of creation. The more I understand the mind and how it digests things we see and the way those things are regurgitated, the better I think I’ll be at improving nuclearly my creative efforts, and transform those ethereal sparkles into actual ideas and practical projects.

So I’m trying to use my forces to understand those cognitive steps, and how my mind flashes and bleeps and do its mindy things. It’s a process that’s extraordinarily fast, and so this methodic categorization helps me in knowing what elements gleam and disappear so instantly in this cognitive process. For instance, the gems are things that have their quintessences gleaming and I know then they had something to do with the event.

This way I can then analyze this gem alone, without the rapid physics of cognitive happenings. When the particular crest and gem comes back hooded in disguise as it’s a common deal, I can also spot its “species” or so to say, and so I can be less baffled by the whole mess that are those quintessential moves.

Of philosophy (blending art and science)

As I so often state, I don’t follow most of science’s steps except some of the most basic ones that are deeply essential to any studies. And as I am not being quite academic in my ways, I do quite guilt myself of being too much of a parasite in a world deeply explored and understood and manipulated and improved by computer programmers, physicists, engineers, biologists, chemists and many others.

But there’s a way I can contribute to science without actually doing science, or their science. I’m more of the human sciences group, but hey, who said those can’t be useful to the improvement of scientific thought or even advancement of technology?

Through philosophy and something of psychology as well it has been becoming a nuclear tool these discoveries improve people that those scientists are. And we’re all human, so we all need to understand more than just the science we study. Scientists and engineers have to be as creative and think out of the box as much as artists do.


Of non-utilitarian research

My mind is still too crowded with thalassic thoughts. And my mind overloads with a strange pressure as they’re still both unborn and unaborted. So I need to find at least one way to let them escape and free my mind a little bit.

One of these thoughts I’ve been having is a mindtrap regarding something like a short-guessed expectation of reality. It’s about the misinterpretation of cause and consequence and expecting a much short link between the two. It’s a reductionist view of the world as we exclude too many vertices of the process. In other terms, it’s about wanting solutions to come in short-term.

An example I have of this is when people judge some areas of study based on their utility. We have grown used to have the necessity to do something that will benefit mankind readily. Science suffers from that, let alone philosophy and art.

Maybe this is why I guilt myself for, by judging my thoughts and theories on how useful and practical and how good it is being for the world. But but but… this is what I’m good at. I think about the mind, and one day this could just unexpectedly influence the way people think and approach their subjects. It bears a nuclear potential and it can influence all fields of studies.

Of art, love and rape

I might have become spoiled and careless, but I think I’ve grown used to having simple solutions to big problems and doubts I used to have. So I think I should take it with a grain of salt when I say I might have finally learned that I think can significantly improve my works. It might even be the one key role in the mystery of trances.

The answer is, after all, too obvious to be true that I’m actually mentioning it, but yeah, it’s about treating my tasks something we value immensely. Consider it like a kiss. Gently, softly, with absolutely no hurry, but with extra care. Respectful and delicate tasting at the beginning, finding our ways in a temperate manner.

Art seems to demand to be treated with respect, so it has to feel comfortable in our hands before delivering themselves to us. It’s when we’re willing to explore further, the creativity and burning passion quite characteristic of trances naturally come by. The gentleness attract butterflies.

I’ve been having trouble finding trances lately while I was feeling forced to work with creative forces. I had a terrible block and I just couldn’t afford the demand. I was having such a hard time creating that I was doing it so brutally. A proper analogy to this context is that I was raping my way to creation.

Hard lesson: It can’t be through violence we’ll become one in trance.

It’s the logic of love-making, but it isn’t from the system of sex, but also from other systems with artistic characteristics. So sex is art, drawing is art, cooking is art. It’s through the foreplay and getting acquainted with the ingredients that the art blooms and things I want to try and explore show up, while in those rape attempts things come clunky and awkward.

Of course, sometimes gentleness isn’t required and trances are handed promptly, but that requires the use of Release and Restraint for these passions to happen like this. And with that I can get trances only now and then, and when I needed them I just couldn’t find them anywhere.

So far I couldn’t get many evidences so far that these foreplays are actually going to be so effective. Different activities still require some different kinds of patience, so it won’t always be so easy to just sit down and do warmups. I think one other important factor in the foreplay is to constantly remember the reason we love what we are doing.

Of trapfallen ideas

Though I’m an avid collector of crests and gems and mindscapes, I am much more of a idea-hunter aficionado. I admit it, I do it to an extent that’s not good for any parties involved. There are times when it is even an unhealthy obsession, which can even ward off ideas in the circling proximity.

So I’ve got to seize strategies for ideas to come. There are artifices I have to use in order to call their attention. It’s about luring them, and making them feel comfortable with my presence. Frightened beings, ideas. They run away from lousy ones.

They are attracted to the scents of certain gems, it appears. But it’s always hard to see what gems they’re hungry for. It’s a very subtle skill, luring them, but I’m sure there are always certain particular crests that attract ideas like butterflies to our gardens.

The best strategy and also a quite hard one is for me to become a part of the ambient, so they won’t feel disturbed by my presence. As soon as the ambient calms down to its normal state, the ideas just start glowing, like fireflies, and I see them flying in front of me, and when I’m one with the ambient of ideas, I can dance around them. I can dance with them. We become one.

Of silver-ignited trances

Though I’ve been thinking about gentle foreplays to start working my way into trances for activities, and that quite requires the Amber gem for me to put the world out my door, I’ve been thinking that for having trances and for having the ideas, there’s one other gem that seems to be so much more effective.

The Silver gem, the one dealing with sciences and graphics and science-y words works very frequently in making my way into getting myself into seeing patterns and equations and understand better the formulas of the world. Somehow it’s about the words and method and line of thought that inspires me.

There’s a podcast I listen to which I usually save for when I seem to be running dry of inspiration, and there’s hardly any session when I can’t get myself at least three new entries of topics I want to give myself some thought.

Maybe the real key is that I’m being fed content, and so my mind starts devouring it immediately. It’s even one of my worst problems, the way I can get astray from readings so goddamn easily, though not always having productive thinking.

Of mazes, corridors and locked rooms

There are secret places I want to be in, but they’re not in this world we live in. They’re states of mind. They are actual places in this innerverse, as the stringed representation of these ethereal places I find in my mind. One of these places would be stringing trances as one of Hephaestus main rooms of study.

It seems like the world is just constantly trying to prevent me from getting there, with all obligations and lack of time. To me that’s what suddenly feels important. Since it’s so secretive, it’s like when we were kids and the Forbidden was always an incentive to explore, instead of being discouraging.

The problem is, I find it hard to find this place – this state of mind. It has some requirements for this room to be unlocked. Maybe it’s such a special room that only Hephaestus has access to it (but I can’t switch characters to him easily), or maybe even he has difficulty to find it.

Sometimes I can just stumble upon it, but I really need to find the way through the maze that leads me to this place, or at least learn of its path, since it changes every time (since each time there’s a different crest calling).

Unfortunately, there’s not enough time for me to explore these mazes, which is a shame. If I had easy access to it, I feel I could just be so much more introspective, artistic and poetic if I didn’t spend most of my time warming up.

Of brick’s worth

My memory is getting really, really weak. I’m having a hard time remembering every single time, but somehow the things I’ve written here I can recall not only well, but I can also know when it was posted. So, despite spending so much time without writing here I know when something has been already written about.

I once talked about the idea of brickwork, which is the building of great things that happens slowly, brick by brick. I think that is still valid, since I keep doing things at a very slow rate. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean I’m being that patient all this time long.

But once in a while I enjoy seeing the difference only brick only can do. For every little thought, every text written and every page drawn there was a piece of my future and my identity there was being shaped. It was their importance in making the final result better and sharper.

Unfortunately, I am plagued by common sense notions most of my time too. So I don’t always have this appreciation for the small things as much as they desserve. A brick is usually defined as something pejorative, as “another brick in the wall”, but it’s the collective effort, it’s the union of all bricks that make the wall to be what it is. 

Of halfborn dioramas and vortexes

In these landscaping exercises, I’ve been searching the world extensively for landscapes for my world, and whilst I do my daily commute, I’ve been noticing some places that call my attention every single day. And then I recalled an old idea of mine that fell into disuse.

All that call my attention I call a vortex. And if it calls my attention on a regular basis, then something very interesting is underneath. Its twin idea, Undercurrent, is present more for those equations and other behavioral analysis, as in here it’s something more personal, and it has to do with crests. That particular building near a park or that particular hut on top of a small rocky cliff call my attention because they appease me somehow.

This cliff reminds me of hills and mountains, and more specifically a house on top of hill I was watching once and I’ve got a nice mindscape, because it had only the blue sky behind it, and the moon in daylight close to it as I’ve always loved it. It was near the sea too, so things that were connected to the crests present in that particular mindscape call my attention due to the wehmut process and so other crests can be recalled.

The game gets crazy when I have to take in account this mindscape was already influenced by previous mindscapes that had other crests involved, such as the daylight moon one, and so it becomes a sort of insanely complex net of wires crossing through and combining with each other that is the source of dreams and dioramas.

Anyway, I’ve been paying attention to those vortex landscapes that attract my attention and I see they are already going through the diorama-making process. Some don’t seem to have gone through it entirely. So while they feel like dioramas, I do recognize they’re still actual places.

The process is working though, so maybe it just needs more brewing or digestion time

before regurgitation works. The important thing is, since the landscaping process started, it did work around the mechanics of dioramas, even if slightly, so in general terms I’m taking the right path. A nuclearity could be around.

Of diorama landscaping

The comfort zone given by thalassic state of creation is very hard to abandon. I could have been past that point a long time ago, but my principles are peculiar, since I’m so decisive about finding the most appropriate way to represent my emotions geographically. Without that being properly stringed the rest of process won’t be of any help.

But while I can’t really decide whether Ersatz is an independent opponent of Ilium or battle for the same possession of land because both ideas have their own alluring call, or what Lazurian should actually represent, I am finally coming with the best solution for creating the visual of my world. While it might not be precisely the answer as to the quintessential locations and placements, it’s at least helping me coming up with an identity for it.

Loose ends are tied up and Eva engines connect themselves as dioramas come into the stage as my secret fuel to create all those scenarios. After all, I don’t want to simply replicate landscapes I know in my life. No, thanks to diorama and its complex regurgitation effect, beautiful and original areas are coming to life.

Since I started understanding how they might work, I’ve realized I can make them very numerous, and when I see my mind is teeming with dioramas, I see they can connect somehow. After all, I can make gems slowly give way to other gems as landscapes change, so the countryside can slowly change to coastal area and vegetation can change, and roads can travel those fields and mountains, and slowly I can insert more peculiar dioramas, like the very primordial diorama, the German House By The Lake. I could add remote cottages, curious stone monuments, caves and dark towers on top of cliffs hanging over the violent sea.

This will be my chance to develop some sense of level design and mapping. But I’m not trying to come with overly fantastic places. No, I want some moderately natural scenarios, while I learn more about this diorama-making process. I am thinking mostly of fields, mountains, cliffs and caves and forests. There are structures as well, and I am trying some ideas for diorama-like regurgitations for castles and buildings as well, like using vortexes of buildings I like such the Kremlin or Hogwarts or Roman cathedrals which will influence a diorama-like creation of Ilium main palace.

There should be themes for some general regions. Some fields and prairies and mountains of countryside and Ersatz lands will have this eerie green tone to then, with lots of pine trees and fog. Fog and low clouds everywhere in these highlands. For Ilium I’m thinking of beautiful green fields, something actually Italian-spiced backgrounds, and some coastal blueness. And I see this helps me with grand doubts as to where I would place important locations in this world, as I feel the sea is important to me, so for instance, I already know Ilium will be found next to the coast.

Since this is my world, this must be something that must please me entirely. These fields and roads that I would most definitely love to roam and explore. There are places and memories I can’t visit or experience no more, so I can still visit them in this world. A lot of my lovely childhood will be brought into this.

So this is how crests and dioramas are finally being used for actual creation. While initially it might not follow the strict string principles, the diorama landscaping does follow the quintessential rule as I need to have them meaning something for me. These dioramas are quintessential creations, golden and pure like honey, only achieved through the complete digestion process.

Of character-o-rama and plot-o-rama

These mental abilities I often talk about are one strange kind. Old ones kind of disappear and depending on what I’m doing practicing in my life, new ones arise. So it’s a list that gets updated with constant addition and removal of items. But there’s one I think I might have always had, but seemed to be off my range of perception, so it’s never been actually worked upon.

These are two different skills that have the same operational engine, so to say. Basically, character-o-rama is how I’m calling the tendency I have to see items and objects and elements as characters. It’s how once I wrote of my gems like they were high-school students. It’s clearly one of my vital skills for stringing, as I see emotions as characters.

As for plot-o-rama, is about all the possible plots I can create based on most random events I see around me, in a stringed sort of way. For instance, the way water flows down the street and gets barricaded by a bunch of stones but then the weight of accumulated water pushes the stones away and keep flowing down. As for the stringing, it’s how I can see the battles of my emotions and personal injuries and accomplishments as plot-drivers.

And there it goes some those actually creative skills I have, to compensate this methodical organizer mind I’ve been practicing so much lately. I hope I can develop them properly to see where they can get, because as they are they already make me a little more confident I have what’s needed to be a good original writer.

Of gem glyphs and mindscape sentences

There are some ideas that I feel very hard to fish out of the thalassic depths. Some ideas I have feel either so massive or I just can’t capture them with words, but there’s always the first awkward attempt. One of these aground ideas is… the chunks of the same body that are exposed independently but in the end are revealed to be all connected…

This is what is happening lately since I got so interested in languages. Not only idioms and alphabets, but all forms of expression and communication. And this new interest is but connected to all my subjects of interest so far, especially those of the cognitive psychology and symbolism and mythology and philosophy and science. It seems these subjects are just a way for me to understand the undercurrent that is my own interest that makes me seek those areas.

And as I’ve been interested in languages and creation, I’ve been giving a try to compose a language. Not necessarily an idiom like we more easily associate with the idea, but actually something different from it just so I can understand a little more about our actual languages and the way we think.

So I decided to create one particular language for me. And I’ve got one, which is my language of quintessences. A little part of my thinking works with assimilation of quintessences, and the intuitiveness of quintessential language seems to increase during trances. As great as trances are, anything that increases along with the height of trances I value immensely.

All names I’ve brought here are quintessences. From all capitalized ideas to gems in specific, which have been one of the ways I’ve managed to translate the quintessences crests from this emotional language into written/spoken language like English and Portuguese, by using rocks, minerals and chemical elements to represent them. Although they are words, I believe particular symbols in this sort of pictorial alphabet I’m conceiving in my mind can be even more efficient.

But more than that, I have those gems that are words as components of sentences that are mindscapes. For instance, peridot would be leaf-like symbols, chrysoberyl an overarch glyph, turquoise a droplet-shaped letter, and they can be brought together to shape a simple mindscape phrase. As a written language of symbols and glyphs, together they could become a beautiful ornament like one of those arab engravings (and a nice tattoo).

However, this can go too complex as I keep trying to add details, because as a language I feel it’s vital to be an actual record of a message completely by itself. So if I write down as a mindscape sentence, I have to be able to read the sentence and decode its symbols so I can understand what is meant with all those squiggly lines. I’m thinking already about prefixes and suffixes to indicate the nature of the gem. If it’s a sound, image or smell, those go first. Suffixes can define more precisely the element. For instance, there’s the sensorial indication of, say, vision, then peridot as a leafy glyph and after it the indication it’s a tree. Accent marks can define its size, height, weight, etc.

As I’m looking towards having it similar to the way quintessences work, they shouldn’t as much be sequential, but more instantaneous, so a sentence would be quite an image with symbols creating its message. The reading skill for this would be too demanding, as it would require an instantaneous absorption of all elements as possible, and that just wouldn’t work. It would have to be a work of composition though, creating focal points and guiding the eyes of the reader. But then, it would still have to retain so linearity.

My first attempt to represent mindscapes in written language have one main drawback. Those don’t seem to express and transfer much of the essence of the composition. The letters and symbols are just showing these would be the elements present in the scene. It would be more like a checklist rather than something poetic or artistic as languages are.

Of cultures and alphabets

It’s my most recent interest lately, visual identity of languages, aka their alphabet. I’ve been randomly practicing my calligraphy for the Arabic, Hebrew and Birmanian and other south Asian alphabets, just because they had such a great calligraphy to them. It was part of the exercise, making my mind try to recover what are the characteristic behaviors of the Arabic alphabet, for instance, and what makes it so unique and beautiful to me.

In the last month I’ve been really interested in engaging in an advanced creation for my world, and so I’ve taken this interest in the calligraphy and the rhythm of letters and writings there. But before I can actually pull a tolkenian trick like making actual new idioms, I’d better focus on this simple identity of the flow of the lines. I am curious about the visual aspect of a new alphabet.

As an advanced part of this exercise, I’m glad to see I’m still pursuing the case of cultural creation I’ve settled for myself at the beginning of the year. That is, I’m getting familiar to the known cultural identities, and I’m already trying to see what comes to my sketches that might be independent from their initial inspiration. You see, quite like dioramas, in a way.

So far my alphabetic sketches are just small variations, but I think this is a ground that still has a lot for me to explore, and that will give me the roots I need for the new cultural identities I long to create.

Of string languages

One of the drivers that makes me long for stories to tell about myself is that I feel just words describing my own disturbances isn’t enough. The theoretical description isn’t enough to grasp all elements. There are things only stories can show about ourselves.

And then again, there are things words can get that stories can’t. Images can show what sounds can’t, and songs can communicate with our souls in ways none of the others can. Isolated they’re all incomplete, is what I’m saying.

A language can be any collection of symbols to express an idea. Aren’t kisses and touches a language to show our passion and love in way words can’t possibly dream of expressing? Aren’t there things that can only be perceiving by this emotional thought and any form of expression will make it be lost in any intersemiotical translation?

This makes me think of how string is really a study of semiotics (and how long I’ve been avoiding to grab a book about it as soon as possible). It’s about the modalities, and how each has a language of their own, how each one is appropriate for a certain type of message. It is left for me to think now what are exactly the messages each modality has a correlation with.

Of roots, deep roots

Probably the gravest problem I have and that hurts me the most is how I’m constantly comparing myself to others. It’s very poignant and takes away my confidence completely, though there just shouldn’t be a reason for that to happen. After all, I’m just taking a different path than most do.

The existence of things like the Quintessential Rule show that I am worried about making things that are solid and standing. It’s all about making the foundations of this universe solid and well-structured. It’s about making it deep and significant. I don’t want this to be a casual creation.

I’m trying to develop some thesis that would help me make my work feel a goddamn lot more solid. These would be like academic theories, though I’m releasing them here. I have the strong belief that if I keep studying Jung and Campbell and their line of thought I’m going to strengthen my roots even more.

The Tankobon Thesis can involve any point I want to get through with the stringing (so showing the idea, not telling it), but it’s more prominent the field of psychology, which seem good enough for now, as well as philosophy and history. Not that it’s actually enough, but I’m really lacking a fortification of my foundations with solid knowledge on sociology, anthropology, politics and economy. Somehow, having a practical use for the knowledge I want to acquire, I think it might be easier to process.

Of purity and innocence (children of Ilium)

Nostalgia can one perilous mermaid thought. The consequences of Erased Mind Effect makes the past always glow more than it used to be, but still, there are moments when nostalgia strikes me down to the core of my heart. And the past feels so appealing to me, like a return to more simpler times without nearly as much worry and sorrow.

As we grow through our adolescence and early adulthood, we’re mesmerized by the pleasures of adult life, but it wears off quickly. After enough exposure to the problems of the world, often people seek to find escapism constantly.

Our art today seems to primarily serve this purpose, to sooth people’s agitated and stressed souls. No wonder so many movies we love are the ones that allow us to move back to our childhood days. They’re a celebration of this beautiful innocence, like they’re trying to restore a feeling grown-ups have long lost.

In my stringed world, there is going to be a park to represent this magic and beautiful innocence that needs to be kept alive. This park is going to be influenced by the light material that I used to enjoy when I was a kid, and it’s a homage to these Brazilian series of comics and books. This is a minor quintessential dissidence of the essence of Hephaestus, as he’s fueled by still having this living child inside him.

As for string purposes, I’m a little concerned about this being a just too straight-forward adaptation to what it actually means to me, but I think that works nice, to think that these kids are what I need to preserve. They’re who I need to protect, they’re what ersatz mustn’t ever touch.

Of Ersatz invaders and gangsters

One of the most complex part of the stringing process has been the identification of the identity of Ersatz group in this world. I’m really divided by the possibilities of stringing, as there are characteristics that are lost in one while this one has what the other doesn’t.

See, I have two main proposals. There are times when one feels the most opportune, while at other times I’m clinging for the other one. The attempt to blend them in one has been proving itself to be quite hard as well.

So one of them is the classical one where Ersatz is a reign that rivals Ilium as the supremacy of a region. I like this one because it’s good for the stringed world. It is nice for the story as it is. What I really like about the Invaders version is that it could be related to history as Germanic tribes invaded Rome. It’s one of these nice details that add the feeling of having deep roots in the foundation of my project.

The second suggestion is that Ersatz is a crime group working inside Ilium, which works as keeping Ilium entirely a representation of myself, with all good and bad things inside. They would also be working with the less morbid but equally dangerous saboteers involving mostly mindtrap muggers that bring crime and corruption to the city. It makes more sense in the psychological point of view, and it would give this version the equivalent feeling of deep roots that the other version has with History.

There are some things I need to keep in mind, though. I’ve once used to separate scourgers as Ersatz and Lazurian and also Zhàn, but I think in the end they might all be the same, so I need to understand more precisely what it means to have a Lazurian and Zhàn Scourger that differs them from the Ersatz one. And since I’ve brought the Veszprem allies, I’ve been reevaluating what it means to have them all being enemies. After all, Shaytan meaning Life, could be benevolent sometimes. My life isn’t just bad luck all the time.

The most delicate point that I must work carefully, though, and makes the complete difference between those two versions, is the point that Ilium and Ersatz are very deeply connected. Their existence revolves around each other. They are like sibling essences. They quite need each other sometimes.

As I write this text I can slowly define what they really mean and what I need to have, and I’m slowly making my decision. But it’s not going to happen so easily as I need to have my mind pondering the facts cautiously. I need more time to focus in this problem alone, a manual labor of decision, since the automatic resolve I’ve always resolved and I’ve been waiting for doesn’t seem to be working. 

Of anachronic aging

My most terrorizing realizations with time is, obviously, seeing my time taking days and years from my life. That has been influenced by those Utgard wars as I’ve been feeling like both my spirit and body were as if failing. That could only be aging taking its toll so suddenly. But then I started noticing that age is really much more something of the spirit than the body.

In the spam of months, I’ve personally experienced being something like 43, 16, 25, 7 and 32 in this all fucked-up order. It’s so weird to think I’m feeling younger at the age of 24 than I was at 21. Though I’ve come to learn so much from life, I’ve grown weary and tired of certain things and people, but this is not a cumulative burden. One can let go of all of these worries and live happily even after all the troubles we’ve been in.

And another thing, I’m coming to realize something in both ways, first that growing older does not mean necessarily to become weaker and more tired and intolerant, and second because I was unconsciously taking that assumption for granted. Seeing it again with new eyes, being 16 or 25 I can be more devoid of energy than being 32 or 43.

Such a realization lets me rest assured that I can resist against the oppression and heaviness of time, by simply controlling my mind and my emotions. A pity that’s showing to be exactly one of my greatest weakenesses.

Of ersatz excuses

Introspection comes with the responsibility of facing truth, hard ugly truth. One can’t come back from their self-discovery whole and fully confident of themselves anymore. It crushes hopes and dreams when we learn of our rotten sides, but it is no better to leave them hidden.

And so when something like Ersatz starts making part of my world, representing all of my murkiest ways, I assume it must be fortunate as I know where I have to keep my eye on.

Generally I feel like coming up with reasons why I can’t reach out my full potential. I’m being drawn back by health issues, or then I’m feeling depressed or then there’s always circumstances that are completely responsible for my shortcomings. I’ve come to avoid responsibility when I reached the point to find myself glad I had new hindrances for me to hide behind.

It is indeed one Conundrum as the feeling of cleanliness felt after those sour sessions is one that is hardly ever felt by those who just ignore their dark side.

While start growing aware of this realization, I’ve been trying to avoid it, but when I did confront with it, expecting to feel really bad about myself, somehow I felt a strange pride of myself, and then the mere realization started making me avoid the noticed misconduct, because I would be in control of myself.

Of Edgewalkers

The dream of the Great Aftergoal is a big one to me, even if I don’t want to acknowledge it. The road of life has been so weary for me that I’ve been finding myself unconsciously longing to find the moment in life when all problems will be gone.

Even though this mindtrap might seem so common a desire, I hope the rest of the world isn’t like me. I hope there’s just few people like me feeling the entire time to be on the edge of their fall, barely making their way through life, because situations and circumstance change from great to terrible in a minute.

It’s a constant permanence of being in a state of tension of feeling like almost falling that makes the journey so tiresome here and there. Honestly, there are moments when I just desire to fall at once.

The problem with this mindtrap is that I’m not enjoying the journey. But that’s the easy part of the realization. I can’t get rid of heaviest burden scourgers bring upon me, no matter how much I’m advancing in life, they’re always there. I can’t seem to find the way to enjoy life with all the pressures, burdens and pain.

Of side-effect vertices

We are for some reason naturally inclined to have strange beliefs. And not rarely they seem to go against reality. Not rarely they are caused by the difficult situations of reality, and soaked in them we are expecting our troubles to end. Life does not work like that, most unfortunately.

The world runs on colateral effects. There are always consequences for what we do. Every single thing we do will have a consequence, and by dealing with this other one a new side-effect will happen, and they gather, and these side-effects become even more dangerous because they’re already affiliated to the original problem. If we can’t think ahead, these consequences will inevitably become na issue bigger than the original one.

One example of these side effects is when I take an antidepressant or a calming tea and they make me sleepy. And then I drink coffee and they it suddenly is bad for my already weakened stomach, and so I spend my days with heartburns and very indisposed, which brings me to lack of engaging activities and I swirl back into depression.

The aftergoal is present here, as the same thing goes for when I’m having something bothering me, and when I get what I think will make the problem be solved, there’s just a new consequent issue. Removing it will make you return to the initial problem, trying to remedy it will make the structure even more unstable and prone to rumble.

In the end, I think this fright of problems might just be because I’ve grown to dread dealing with them. It can pretty much ruin my life. I’m learning those who do enjoy life are those who don’t see problems as problems – either those who don’t care about them, and blatantly ignore them, and those that take joy in living with problems, seeing them as fun challenges.

Of coping with choices and consequences

Sure I feel sometimes I abuse the terms worst and best and hardest and easiest around here. I think it has to do with the mindtrap that makes us always see the present moment as the most intense and importante moment we have, but I’ve trying to avoid it the most I can. However, I must say, choices are one of the hardest things to do in life.

Choices aren’t ever easy. They are not choices if they are. Choices are never about doing the right and wrong, the good and bad. There’s no path of siths and jedis or renegades and paragons. One can do the wrong by thinking they’re choosing the right thing.

They will always give us two options to choose from, and you’re lucky if one of them has converging advantages that will make the picking easy, but usually I find only options that have an amazingly balanced set of advantages and disadvantages, though not exactly in that spot when both options are good enough. Letting go of one of them has always to be a pain.

And if choosing is hard, coping with consequences is even more complicated.

Last weeks I’ve been paying attention to decisions I make. Inevitably some choices that seemed so right turned out to be so destructive, because I couldn’t see small details that would just ruin all the strategy of my decisions. And then, we base our choices on our circunstances, but boy these are smartasses. Taking your decision in account, they will rapidly change, and, seriously, in a matter of a week what seemed to be the best decision is now a deeply regretted one.

Of sublime storm goddesses

While I want to record those years of my life, I’m losing a lot of events behind. Only major and relevant events so far are being able to be recorded, and even still, very puzzling as to the ever-complex stringing process. Falling in love, and most importantly, being engaged in a romantic relationship is one of those events that deserve my attention to practice stringing.

One of the main characteristics of passion and love that I’ve come to learn, is that it can be beautiful and awe-inspiring, but also brute and destructive. The appearance of such an entity (or event, as I suppose there wouldn’t be gods in my fourth layer), changes things in my life, for better or worse. Not only I feel a change of generations, but depending on how impacting they can be, they can actually change the geography of the world, leaving scars and craters or then boost Ilium’s development (such as happened with the birth of this blog).

This is something that seems concerning to both Áine and Sfayi. Them two could be sorceresses, trying to tame this wild and all-powerful being with dual characteristics to their side. In this last appearance of such a sublime goddess she was shown curiously benevolent, so I’ve been calling her Iris as to all the grace she can bring. If any twist turns her against Ilium, she’ll become the dark Nyx and dark armies will stroll and her harpies can help the mutilation of the land.

As with most relationships that start so beautiful, this goddess might start with the mood of Iris, but through eventual misdeeds and misfortunes she might slowly (or worse, suddenly) become a terrible force of destruction which is absolutely terrible for Ilium.

One of the most interesting effects I’ve felt since the last storm though is that with the presence of Iris lots of fears I had are now fallen. Several insecurities I used to have were swept away by the winds of Iris (just realizing now she’s also close to Zephyrous Winds). Very curious, though, is how this is quite literally the Deus Ex Machina when I come to realize it, albeit not an intentional use of it.

However, the deepest source of the essence of Ersatz still feels rooted and showing an interesting and worrying reaction to finding a healing love in my life. I picture it, in one of the interpretations I have of Ersatz, as if a stormly being attacked by their forces, crudely repelled but wounded. I have no clue as to why there’s a resistance. Could be the instinct of survival of the parasite who’s long been feeding upon my energies. Perhaps Vesta and Áine could go along well in dealing with problems and obstacles with patience and a lighthearted carefreeness.

Of Shiva’s Slit

No wonder studying mythologies are great for the comprehension of ourselves. They can fed us with such deep content. They often offer the very wise messages for us, and it’s one of the reasons I want to string myself into a mythological sort of story, because I want to do something like a reverse engineering with it.

One of the last impacting lessons I’ve taken from studying mythologies is the duality and the eternal cycle between creation and destruction. The interesting thing for me is that they have a god of destruction, called Shiva, but it isn’t a demonized creature like our western mythologies would have it credited. Instead, it’s just the part of the cycle of life needed for maintain life working. Only destruction is as much prejudicial as only creation. Sole creation leads to chaos.

It’s a great lesson, and something I need to practice doing. Just destroy things a little bit. Indeed, too much creation and too many parallel possibilities is making my mind feel really chaos for sure.

This hinduist principle of destruction for renovation and order feels each time more relevant to me, the more I think about it. Should’ve realized this sooner, and maybe this should be kept in my golden box of my most important lessons and principles.

Of String Spine (and parallel layers)

Picking and choosing is probably the hardest part of creation process. From the multitude of thalassic possibilities, we often have to come up with one chosen idea, which makes my heart cringe. But it’s not for the need to leave the comfort of thalassic zone that I think I should undervalue the other possibilities.

In the same manner as different forms of language can communicate different messages to us, alternative ideas for stringing are great too. For instance, I once did stringing before realizing it as a string, which was to organize into departments and ministries as I first did before the flames even existed. The black vs white wolf, is also another way to allegorize those feelings, in a much more simplified way. It works as a corroborating parallel, needed to examine details too neglected in the standard main version of stringing.

The existence of parallel and horizontal spreading of strings will probably make it become a hell harder to organize, but it shows possibilities that are much better for me to perceive things a vicious mind trapped in the same kind of strings can easily leave ignored.

But then again, at the end there must be one main line of stringing process in which I have to divide in the four layers (and are something more like vertical parallel layers). All horizontal layers are sort of competitors for being my focal effort, located in this spine. It’s reserved for the most promising stringed scenario, the one that matches both sides of the string without loose ends.

Of micro and macro stringed framework

Frameworks fascinate me. For some reason, I just so love having this measured reality and seeing everything inside it, like it’s an ant colony. It’s something that gives me so much pleasure that I often wonder whether I’m obsessed with seeing things under control, or then having things under control.

Anyway, I’ve been rethinking about the Braudel’s Framework, one of the ideas I’ve got since before this blog was born, and that is always being so influential to me, even for things that go beyond the range of classification of events. It’s useful for just everything, from scale of importance to classification of thoughts.

But there’s this one use of it I think is quite cool, too. It’s not something entirely new, though, as it’s related to… strings. And not the Layers of String I often talk about, from (Me), Heaven, Hero and Human, which is a sort of reversed Braudelian framework that is most of artforms. No, I’m talking about the stringing of the individual’s life in comparison to a society’s.

I’m calling them micro for us individuals and macro for them nations and big civilizations. So as I can studying my own History and I can see clear parallels with events in any civilization.

It’s nothing new, since the description of my blog depicts this idea since ages ago. There’s always the glory and the fall, there’s always dark ages and renaissance, age of exploration, accumulated and neglected collateral effects that lead to big wars, then cynicism, etc.

That’s one of the best thesis I’d like to develop in here, and so deepen the roots of my foundations. Understanding those relations between individual and society is one quest of high sociological and anthropological value, and if I didn’t have so many ideas already, this one could be another proposal for a master thesis…

Of metacreation project

It’s taking a really long time to make any presentable versions of my Innerverse. The ones I’ve shown to friends is like alpha version or some early version. So far all have enjoyed the premisses, and I think that explaining to them how I’m creating it has been what’s been interesting them the most.

In fact, I also have fun in making it my hobby that I work in my spare time, brick by brick. I don’t want to be hurried, but I want to enjoy every step of it. More than that, I want to record it down. I want to register my difficulties and how I try to solve the problems I have, and how they bring some side-effects or snowball consequences.

This blog has been becoming the recording of the creation, and understanding its processes as it slowly becomes a thalassic idea that is growing into a very ambitious pelagic project. So in the end the value of what I’m doing is more than having the world in my hands, but also the whole book that its becoming to record it...

Of Innerverse

The most important creations for me have always been those that would take an immense of time to happen. Even if it’s just a simple name, if it’s the process of titling something very important I want it to be as round and fit and perfect as possible, and I’ll be very exigent. As it would be with a name for this string project, it took me a whole year to happen.

Perhaps I’ve found a suitable title for this project. I think it has a sounding name, and it’s even catchy enough to work. It might not be very maneuverable to be used in sentences freely, but it’s got the most important of all advantages: I think Innerverse works nice because its meaning strikes the reader immediately.

However, it’s still not the biggest milestone to stumble upon. There’s the relation of Ilium and Ersatz that still needs to be resolved and it’s going to determine the rest of the world. It’s taking a huge amount of time and so the whole mapping process is still waiting for it to evolve from the safety of thalassic zone.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

Checkpoint #29

August was remarkably, historically great for me. It brought me so many great things and I am not used to have constant inner peace like this. I remember some long forgotten days when I would have an absolutely great day and I would be in ecstasy because of it, and now I've been having it like five times more often. I am not, but I can see myself getting used to it (and then starting taking it for granted, obviously, it's all about the Aftergoal Sphere [I can't believe I still remember all the names]).

This is suddenly twisting itself out into a great year, in spite of this late negligence for my blog. See, I've got some great accomplishments that put myself so distant from the person I was at the beginning of the year. A fairly decent job, a very sweet girlfriend, and also friending some great people once in a while. Obrigado Mãe, Raquel, Carlos, Edson, Cami, Michael, Zé, Anil, e todos os outros. 

Again my hypothesis that when I'm happy I'm more prone to abandon this place are proved correct. But the reason I am not yet ready to come back seems to be that now I have the resolution not to give up, this suddenly leveled up and has become more serious a business now. All my ideas and plans seem more important to be shared this easily with the whole world...

But man, I do miss this place. I miss writing. I miss the soft and delicate art of tasting our feelings and gently labeling them with our words, an impression of our soul exposed to the outerworld. I miss sitting alone and quietly in the dark or under some lamp and practicing the activity of stretching out my sensibility to a whole new extent. I miss having ideas of the month and getting rid of all this overloaded state of my mind, and arranging them writings in interesting structures. God, I miss the discipline I used to have. That would be the cherry on top of all the great things happening to me.

And now I've got to my full strength once again. It's been really months since I felt this for more than a few hours: feeling strong and willing to stay up, sleep the barely minimum and to wake up and move and work and study and laugh and hug and kiss and feel alive. And I feel my drawings are getting every time better, all while still keeping that ideal of solidity still intact. I am even noticing a new spice to my style that I feel is going to add up to its artistic and even comercial value immensely, and I am really satisfied with that. And I feel the melodies I try to compose are also starting to have that interesting personality and, I don't know, topographic value (once missnamed as Broken Stasis or something [it's great they're all still fresh in my mind).

And the greatest of news, I've seemed to have found the first effective template pattern that is working to safely put Hrungnir at bay. And I wonder if it was being able to ward Hrungnir off or recent events gave me back some vitality, but thing is, the agonizing decay Zhu Rong was suffering from suddenly disappeared, and I am feeling a great joviality and energy that I'm going to waste no more. Glad all I've been feeling didn't have anything to do with aging, apparently.