Monthly Archives: October 2011

Exercise and heart rhythm

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If you want your heart to flutter, there are probably other things you would do than elite endurance sports. Surprisingly, however…

Generally exercise is good for your heart, except in some cases of acute heart trouble. But things are not quite as simple as they sound, Scandinavian scientists have found out.

Studies of runners over 40 in the Norwegian “Birkebeiner” race and the Swedish “Vasalopp” race show that the top runners were far more likely to experience disturbances in their heart rhythm than the less “elite” participants. Both those who ran the fastest and those who ran most frequently had dramatically more cases of arrhythmia. In the Vasalopp, those who had participated at least 7 times had 29% more risk compared to those who had participated only once. And those who had run at less than 1.6 times the winning time had 37% more than those who ran at more than 2.4 times the winning time.

The most common disturbance is extra beats, which are considered harmless but tend to be disturbing. However, these people are also more at risk for oscillations, which can be life threatening. This risk is far lower, but even those who survive will usually have to step down from elite competition.

There is as of yet no official explanation for the findings, but the hypothesis that has been mentioned is a larger heart in top-trained individuals.

Source: Dagens Næringliv (in Norwegian), specifically “Vasalopp-toppene mest utsatt for hjertetrøbbel” and “Trener knallhardt – sliter med hjerterytmen“.

***

Regular readers will guess why I noticed these articles: Both this year and in 2005, I developed heart rhythm disturbances after a few months of regular exercise. Not exactly a great incentive to continue exercising, although the doctors and available literature assure me it is not life threatening at the current level.

There is a big difference however between me and the elite runners: I don’t run at all, I just walk (although in some cases I walk up long hills, which is an equivalent load to running on flat terrain, but uses the muscles differently.) There is nothing elite about my physical exertions at all. There are two other similarities, though.

Most notably, I have a remarkably low heart rate. Usually my resting pulse is in the interval 55-60, which is on the low end of normal. But late this summer it fell to 50, which is only normal for those who are active in endurance sports: Runners, bikers, swimmers etc on at least local competition level.

In addition, I am not visibly fat. It is kind of weird to even have to mention this, but these days it is normal to be fat if you are not an athlete.

I am pretty sure it is the first of these that is the key here. I believe the extra beats arise as a result of the slow heart rate. In the pause between beats, the heart is probably in some way more susceptible to false clues to start another beat. For most people, that pause is simply too short to trigger extra beats often (without the help of caffeine or romance, at least). As the beat gets slower, the opportunity for false starts increases. That is how I imagine it. I don’t have any medical education whatsoever, but it seems logical and it fits the fact.

So basically I consider myself a control group. If it was just the exercise that caused the change, then it would not affect me, since I exercise much less. But if the exercise causes this by lowering the heart rate below a certain threshold, then it would work for both of us.

Of course, there are (as implied from the start) many other things that can cause the heart rhythm to get unstable. But those are not things that change with the amount of exercise. If anything, exercising more means less time to drink coffee, and surprisingly also less nervousness. Whether it also causes less romance, I won’t have an opinion on. ^_^

***

Note that for most people these days, their pulse is on the high side rather than the low. This has its own problems. If your pulse is above 80, you should have a talk with your doctor about finding ways to exercise in a gradual way so as to build up your heart, and get the heart rate down. Obviously most people in the western world face very different health challenges from what I and the top athletes do! How did I end up in the wrong bin anyway?

 

Me, by my side

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I am perhaps the only one who get associations to “the other shore” from this Twinings ad. But that is not what I will write about today.

A friend of mine luckily mentioned this advertisement from Twinings, and provided a handy link. This is a YouTube video, so it may not be suitable for all workplaces even though there is no objectionable content. But it has moving pictures. It has also a song, which in my opinion can be skipped without great loss. It is not inappropriate or ugly, but it does not resonate strongly enough with the animation to be crucial.

\”Twinings gets you back to you\”

For those who cannot see it, this is a short animated video with a slightly watercolor style, especially of the character. A young woman is rowing a small boat alone in the middle of a sea with high waves. She loses one oar and fails to catch it. The waves increase to frightening proportions that would by rights overturn or fill the boat, but strangely instead the waves and the storm conspire to push the boat ever more rapidly forward until it is flying on the top of the waves, and the storm-tossed foam takes the shape vaguely of seagulls flying overhead without losing its character as foam. As the boat lands again, the water rapidly becomes calm and the sky clears up, the boat continuing by its momentum toward a beautiful shore. At the shore someone is waiting. The young woman jumps out of the boat as it stops on the sandy bottom, and wades ashore there to meet her identical twin in a loving embrace. Then as the two line up side by side they seem to fade into one person drinking tea, and the message “Twinings gets you back to you”.

In real life, I would say that under such adverse conditions it would take rather more than tea to bring us back to us. But that is not my message today, gentle reader.

***

Rather, after watching the video clip a few times, I had my own inner vision (albeit dimly) of a potential story for this year’s NaNoWriMo, one appropriately symbolic while detached enough from reality to riff upon, as you say in English.

The story would be about a young man who has a fateful encounter with himself – but not his current self. Rather, a godlike being (in the classical, idiomatic sense, not in the monotheist sense) who may be him from the future, or from an alternate timeline, or a higher reality, or two or more of the above. Basically, his ultimate potential.

Over the last few years I have repeatedly begun writing about a young man meeting a woman from a higher reality – a goddess in the classical sense – who for some reason has decided to seek him out and live with him, although usually others cannot see her at all (and certainly not for who she is). This is basically the Jungian approach, since the Anima is usually the first experience of the numinous for a man, not counting religion as such. Rather, the goddess-complex is normally projected on some woman of his own generation, and it is with this projected ideal woman he falls in love, rather than with the actual person. In real life, amazing women are very rare (I have only really known one offline, outside my own clan) and goddesses are rarer than hen’s teeth.

The upside and downside of the goddess approach is the erotic tension in their living together, which I circumvent in various ways. I like to think that most normal readers will not see a great deal of erotic tension in a person meeting his higher self: Most autoeroticism is pretty far from “higher” in any way I can think of. The downside is that it is probably a larger leap of imagination for the reader, if any. (The “if any” part makes it ideal for NaNoWriMo, which used to have the slogan “quantity over quality”. Not my favorite slogan but somewhat comforting for a write-a-ton.)

***

Being rather far from typical, at least now in my later years, I remember an amusing episode brought about by the voices in my head (which, need I remind you, are not actual hallucinations in my case, but rather streams of thought with some level of independence: People who are unfamiliar with introspection would probably assume they were thinking these thoughts themselves, which is in a certain sense true). The “voices” or muses can sing, however, and do so much of the time, enticing me to sing along. Conversely, they tend to sing along when I play songs I like. This also happened one day while I was listening to a love song by Chris de Burgh, for many years one of my absolute favorite artists (and composer and songwriter).

The song was, appropriately, By My Side, from the album Power of Ten, the first album of his that I bought (although he had been active for a long time by then).

When everything has gone,
you help me carry on;
you lift me up,you make me strong,
you give love to see me through…
Oo-oo-oo what would I do
without you
by my side?

But my voices took a slightly different route: They sang, without me by my side?

Which is kind of appropriate now, I guess. Thanks to Twinings…

 

Speaking or being spoken

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“The road to refinement is difficult.” But you’ve made a great start just by shutting your mouths! Congrats!

In the first chapter of Meditations on the Tarot, our Unknown Friend mentions speech almost in passing (when talking about concentration or yoga as stilling the oscillations of the mental substance, or willed silence of the automatism of the intellect and imagination). His point is that to most people, speaking is automatic. Not in the positive sense that you don’t need to think of how to move your tongue or your vocal cords, but in the negative sense that words just jump out of your mouth without a conscious decision to speak, much less exactly what to speak.

He says that the Pythagorean school prescribed five years of silence for beginners, or “hearers”. Only once they had learned fully how to be silent, could they be allowed to speak. At this time, it was judged that they were no longer just speaking automatically.

By default, there is an inner pressure to speak. The restless activity of the mind seeks an outlet. It is not so much that one has something to share with others, or even that one asks others for a favor.  Rather, there is speaking inside the head and it comes out. In the really bad cases, this is similar to how a baby excretes bodily wastes – it just happens, and the best one can do is clean up the mess afterwards. This is generally how children speak for many years after they have learned continence on the other end. Some people remain in this sad position throughout their lives.

Others – probably most, now that service is such a main source of employment – learn to “potty train” their mouth, so that they can hold back the words that bubble up inside. It may require them to ball their fists in their pockets or behind their back where the customer cannot see it, but then as soon as the source of their agitation is out of earshot, it all comes out.

This kind of verbal excretion is mentioned by Jesus Christ, who says that it is not what goes in through the mouth that makes a human unclean, but what comes out through the mouth: Evil thoughts that come from the heart and pass through the mouth; these make a human unclean. We Christians call this Jesus Christ “our Lord”, but it actually does not come easy to us to obey him in this. Of course it does not, for as long as the evil thoughts (or at least “thoughtless words, which cut like swords”) bubble up inside, the pressure will just keep rising if we close our mouth. Silence of the mouth is a terrible fate if one has no way to achieve at least a modest degree of stillness of the heart.

Stillness of the heart, then, is required in order to truly speak, rather than being spoken by the pressure of words that bubble up from inside. Stillness of the heart is hard to achieve without some degree of solitude. In fact, it takes a lot of solitude for a long time, for most of us. It is not impossible to arrive at this stillness in a noisy, busy, crowded life; but it takes an inordinate amount of dedication and grace put together. To expect that God’s grace (or some other karmic benefit) will make up for the lack of outward quiet – when one has a choice of such quiet – is rather similar to jumping from the top of the temple spire, relying on God’s grace to not get hurt.

Of course, not everyone can live alone or should live alone, or in a monastery of silent monks or nuns. Sometimes you just have half an hour now and then, or perhaps Divine providence makes it so that you cannot sleep for a period at night, so that you then get a chance to still the waves of your mind and commune with the Light in the depths of your heart.

But first and foremost we need to become aware of the words we speak (or type, for those of us so inclined!) We need to choose self-reflection: What did I just say? Where came these words from, did I really mean to say this? We need to reflect on our spoken words for sure if we shall ever hope to reflect on our thoughts.

To the religious, self-reflection saves from Hell; for it is written: “Pay attention to yourself and the teaching,  keep doing this; for when you do so, you shall save yourself and those who hear you.” (The phrasing in your particular religion will vary, but not the fact, surely.) But even if you are not religious in the traditional sense, surely you have a higher aspiration, or you would not be here reading this. You are not like cats or dogs, who make sounds merely to scare enemies, attract mates, evoke sympathy and obtain food.

I have had the opportunity for transformation in this regard that only a tiny, tiny fraction of humanity has ever had in all of history. If I have achieved some degree of awareness and choice of speech, it is no more than is required under such circumstances. In truth, almost certainly less. So I am not here as a teacher to instruct you, but as a fellow aspirant to encourage you in our shared hope and aspiration. May my words have been acceptable.

 

Letters and Light

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That’s pretty much the result I am aiming for. Bright, warm happiness. ^_^

I just got an e-mail from the Office of Letters and Light. Despite the pretentious name, it is actually the organization (such as it is) behind the NaNoWriMo movement – the National Novel Writing Month. More about that later, Light willing. Probably a lot more.

From my experience with the NaNoWriMo stampede, there is rather more letters than light, in the sense that many people write rather dark novels. I guess that is an expression of their soul or something – most are young and the majority seems to be girls. Youth is not an easy time for most people these days (and some never recover) and girls don’t have as many opportunities to act out their internal tragedy. So I am understanding if their novel ends with the world exploding or at least the main characters all dying. But that is not what I personally think of as “Letters and Light”!

When we are young, we are usually in the shadow of other souls that have dominated us: Parents, obviously (mostly mothers, these days, at least in Scandinavia), but also teachers and leader personalities in school or in one’s flock of friends. Few have the strength when young to stand up in this massive onslaught of informal authorities, to rise up and say “I must follow my own heart, I must walk in the Light that shines inside my soul.” This did not happen to me until I was around the age of 16.

Each person has his or her own soul and destiny. But when you are young, your destiny has not yet unfolded. Others are responsible for you. But subconsciously you know that the life you should live is different from what your supervisors imagine for you. (Usually – there are some cases where they align, but this is probably the exception these days.) This difference causes a friction that is perceived as a suffering. They are walking in their own light (which may or may not be Light as we know it) and want you to also walk in their light, but you are walking in their shadow until you become you in earnest. This usually takes quite some time.

For me, on the other hand, who has already lived on my own for over 30 years, I rather prefer to write actual “letters and light”, or luminous prose. I want those who might read me to sense some of the happiness and joy of living. I admit that it can get a bit shallow and fluffy. I am not good at Great Drama. I think people who are in an existential crisis should not read my fiction or even my journal, but rather the Book of Job or some such grand message from Heaven. I hope I am a good influence overall, but I don’t think of myself as the kind of person you would call for when you realize that your final hour on Earth is at hand.

(I have a brother who is that kind of person. There is definitely a difference.)

In Meditations on the Tarot, Unknown Friend has a chapter (the High Priestess) where he treats the levels that the Light has to go through to become a book. (Well, among other things. His chapters are pretty wide-ranging.) Perhaps I should read up on that? Well, I guess my aspirations in book-writing are quite a bit lower than his yet. I really don’t think I am up for writing timeless classics anytime soon. But I hope at least my letters will give off light rather than darkness, by and large. That is certainly my aspiration!

 

A community of living and dead

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In this old anime, a Japanese housewife places the picture of her deceased son so that he can watch baseball on TV. This is a somewhat crude and literal way to include the dead in the community of the living, but I think most of us can at least somewhat understand how she feels. There are more subtle ways to transcend time and mortality, though.

Already in the short foreword to Meditations on the Tarot, the author tries to take us into a world that may be unfamiliar to most. He greats us as an unknown friend “from beyond the grave”. That is not to say that he wrote this book after his death, but he arranged for it to be published years after his passing, and anonymously. I understand this decision: On this path, you continue to grow and change throughout your life. If you knew some of his earlier works, it would color your impression of this one, which was specifically designed to stand on its own.

When I say the book stands on its own, this does not mean he makes no reference to those who have inspired him. He does, but for a very specific purpose: The quotes are “evocations”, to bring these great spirits of the past to be present in the room with the reader, so to speak. This requires some explanation.

We must not understand this in a crude spiritism sense, where the ghosts of the dead masters are floating around like transparent shapes looking for a medium who can see them and convey their thoughts. Far from it. We are not talking about the astral bodies, but a far deeper layer of the person. But also, I would say that these great spirits are not moving forward in time to speak to us. Rather, they speak to us from where they lived. They speak to us across time, because they were greater than time, they extended beyond time, and so does a tiny part of us. That part is how we can feel connected to them despite them having long passed from this world. There is a part in us that is not limited to this world and to this time. And it is this part we seek to develop by means of such tools as Meditation.

Unknown Friend explains that what we call Tradition is not a doctrine or theory, but a community of people – some still alive but most having lived in the past – who each is a link in the chain of Tradition.

This is not unique to this book. In Eastern Orthodoxy, it is generally understood that those who lived in the past and even those who shall live in the future are part of the Church. They are included in the communal prayers, and are also assumed to include us in their prayers when they lived or are going to live. We are the Church members of the future for those who lived in the past, and the Church members of the past for those who have yet to live.

Nor is this unique to Christianity. In China, there has for thousands of years been a quest for immortality. In its crude, exterior form this is simply an attempt to prolong the life of the body, but there is a deeper, esoteric understanding of the Immortals as spirits who transcend time. The “teacher” in the proverb “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear” is understood to mean the immortals.

And this is exactly what happens here in the west with a book such as Meditations on the Tarot. If you are not ready, even if you should somehow happen to find the book, the evocations will not work. The timeless high spirits of the past will not inspire you, and quite likely the whole thing will seem either absurd, boring or outright creepy.

This is how it is with esoteric knowledge: The secret hides itself in plain sight. It is not necessary to speak in riddles to not be understood: That is automatic. It is necessary to speak in riddles to be understood, because we are speaking of that which cannot be seen, cannot be heard, and most importantly, cannot be put in the wallet. The people who will even be interested are few.  But perhaps there are enough that I have not written all this completely in vain.  Even if one historian in the future stumbles upon it and feels a twinge of familiarity, I shall be content.

After all, letters to an Unknown Friend is what I have done since 1998, long before I had heard of this book. ^_^

 

Google+ revisited

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Despite the prominent + sign, this picture was actually taken in spring. And not everyone on Google+ is a pervert. Not quite.

Actually, I have visited Google+ every day since first I wrote about it. In fact, I suspect I have visited it way too much. But we’ll get back to that. My world may be revolving around me, but yours is not. So, Google+: Dead or alive?

If you were to believe a widely quoted article by Chitika Insights, Google+ lost 60% of its traffic in just a couple days. Of course, this was right after they had gained 120% in a couple days, namely the days after they opened from invitation to open beta. If you have ever joined the open beta of anything – such as one of the many online games – you will be about as surprised by this as by the bright circular thing that rises from the eastern horizon in the morning.

Chitika has a good reason to try to understate the rapid growth of Google+ (the fastest of any social media so far). It is in the business of advising advertisers. Google does not show ads on the Google+ pages (unlike Facebook, Chitika’s favorite). And when Google shows ads, it has its own system and does not require or appreciate any help from Chitika. So there is definitely a bias here.

That said, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for the crowd who rushed into Google+ without an invitation. They did not come into a noisy common room, but rather an almost empty corridor with locked doors on all sides, except for the exit.

Google+ comes with ready-made provisions for limited sharing. It encourages you to sort your contacts into circles the first thing you do, and while the posting default is still “public”, that only lasts until you actually post something to one (or more) of your circles. This then becomes the new default when you post again.

The higher security level has attracted early adopters who are not your average Facebook user. Minorities, activists, perverts and liberals (but I repeat myself) make up the overwhelming majority of the people I see on Google+. Admittedly, this is probably because I am the kind of person these people include in their circles. But it is certainly a difference from Facebook. Actually, some of the people are the same, but the content is still quite different and rather less restrained.

This goes some way to explain why so much of the Google+ traffic is not public.

Of course, those who have nothing to hide (and want to show it) can do so in Google+ as well, posting whatever they want in public. But there is no particular reason for them to move there if they already use Facebook, unless they have the level of self-awareness to suspect that not everyone is interested in every detail of their very normal life.

Of course, if you really want to share everything with the world, you could make your own blog instead. But then you would not have the illusion that all your friends read it…

Once you’re inside, however, Google seems to be much more active than Facebook or Twitter. Part of it is that people can write as long entries as they want, and generally they are quite a bit longer than “status updates”.  While there are no nested comments, you can alert a specific person by placing a + (or alternatively @) right in front of their name. They will then be notified – if their setting allows it – that you have addressed them directly. This seems to encourage some people to write back and forth at great length, adding to the traffic.

Sharing av media, from music to animated pictures and YouTube clips, is done directly in the stream. No clicking on links named bit.ly and which you have no idea where they go. But all these things also add up. These days there is, unfortunately, a flood of reposts about the various “Occupy [town center]” demonstrations in America. Unfortunately, while Google+ now support clickable #tags, you can’t use them to hide all posts in that category, only to see more of them.

To be honest, Google+ feels kind of crowded and beside the point for me now. I have made a couple small circles with people I really want to read, and go through these more often. The main stream, as it were, is only visited when I don’t feel like I have anything better to do.

One way that Google+ is more like Twitter than Facebook: You can follow people without them following you back. Of course, you are likely to only see their public posts, if any. But it fits me. The people I want to read are not necessarily those who want to read me. I feel a little like the comedian who said he would never join a club that admitted people like him. Well, apart from the comedian part. I probably feel a lot less like a comedian than people would believe…

 

Hermetic tradition, huh?

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4300 years ago is the oldest estimate I have seen, and the oldest known sources are more like 2100 years old; but even then they claim to be part of a much older tradition, so who knows when and where it started.

It would seem that I am become part of the Hermetic tradition, and presumably so is the Pope. I am sure Hermes would enjoy that; perhaps I should write him a letter…

Back when I started reading the blog “One Cosmos”, one of the recommended books (and oft quoted) was Meditations on the Tarot, by a now deceased Catholic philosopher who prefers to be known only as “your unknown friend”. Although his real name is known (and a little famous), it is customary to not mention it. Despite the mention of Tarot, the book is unabashedly Christian, with a vaguely Catholic slant (at least if you know it). It does however draw on a multitude of sources also outside of Christianity.

I bought the book, a hefty tome, unfortunately not available in Kindle form yet.  Truth to tell, I did not get far into it. At the time, it was a rather heavy read. This was at the early years (if not months) of my interest in books of timeless wisdom, and I had little training in reading such things and little understanding of this way of thinking. Some five years have passed since then, I think.

The book was pulled out again on the same blog recently, and I also brought out my own copy.  That’s when I actually noticed the subtitle: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism. 

I was about to write something like “I have written at great length about Hermes Trismegistus”, then decided to link to it, then my search function only showed a couple drive-by mentions. Have I really not gone into detail about this mysterious person, who supposedly lived in ancient Greece or perhaps Egypt? He is known mainly from Egypt after it was conquered by Alexander the Great, and evidently the Egyptian god Thoth was identified with the Greek Hermes. This combined god was called Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the three times greatest. Perhaps that was their way to say “awesome”?

In any case, Hermes supposedly wrote a large number of books containing the wisdom of the universe, but only a tiny portion of these writings are still extant. And this has been the case for a long time. From these somewhat cryptic sources we have people drawing very different conclusions. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, for instance, is more similar to witchcraft than to Christianity. But this book is not.

If you are in doubt, it may be worth noticing that the current Pope is photographed with Meditations on the Tarot on his table. Of course that is not proof, he may have been surveying it for heresies. But he spent his adult life in the same intellectual circle as Hans Urs von Balthasar, who wrote a foreword (now afterword) to the book, and who was nominated as Cardinal by the earlier Pope but died before he could take office.

So Hermeticism seems to have, in fact, once again entered mainstream Christianity. (It made several appearances in the early church, in apologetic writings – that doesn’t mean the church fathers apologized, rather they wrote books to defend the faith. The word has changed meaning since, I guess. But back then, Hermes was considered more respectable than Jesus in some parts of the civilized world.)

Anyway, it seems their paths are meeting again, as it were. I am sure this would amuse members of the Japanese new religion Happy Science, who believe that Hermes and Jesus were friends since before the age of the dinosaurs. But Jesus hasn’t said anything about that to me, so don’t quote me on it. Anyway, I doubt the happy sect members have time to read my blog, given they now have over 700 books to read by the reincarnation of Hermes. And I still haven’t read through Meditations on the Tarot.

 

 

Paid friends

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Hey, how about paying people to become your friends?

I have only so much free time, so after I picked up City of Heroes again, I have barely watched anime. Also, there have been slim pickings of late, at least that could even vaguely interest me. This past weekend, however, I took the time to watch a couple first episodes. One of them stood out.

The one that intrigued me was Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai, (“I don’t have many friends”) where episode 1 was about a high school boy and girl who realized that they were both completely lacking friends. In fact, none of them even had any idea how people made friends in the first place. The girl had an “air friend” (like in air guitar), the boy had thought he had some friends in the school he went to before, but he hadn’t heard anything from them since, so perhaps it had all been one-sided. Says the girl: “You could pay people to be your friends. Like 1000 Yen [$10] to be your friend in school for a week.” The boy rejected this out of hand, comparing it to paid love.

I think she had a great idea there, although the story did not follow that thread. In these times where more and more jobs disappear because we find better technologies, many people go without work. At the same time, there are needs not so easily met by machines. I have noticed that much of emotional advertising plays on people’s want to be accepted and surrounded by friends. So why not pay people to be friends? It should not be so well paid as to keep the skilled workers out of the workforce, but it must be better than just paying people to sit at home and drink beer. Instead, they could drink beer at some gathering place, being social with lonely people.

The most realistic alternative, however (at least in the beginning) is online friends. I mean, you have all kinds of online services, so it is not a big jump. You could have professional chat room hosts, for instance. Professional guild officers in online games. In fact, you could perhaps make a new type of online games that were more social and less violent, and that came with such hosts from the start. How about “home party online”?

Would people pay for this? I think so, if they were not shamed about it. I mean, people pay for porn and phone sex, which is much more shameful. It is not very demeaning to log on to a web site that hosts imaginary home parties, where you mingle with other online guests and professional hosts. Obviously there would need to be ways to deal with troublemakers, but it being a paid service would already go some way toward that.

Actually, it probably already exists, even if I can’t remember having heart about it. If you can think of something, it exists on the Internet – if nowhere else, it exists in Korea. But I don’t know Korea, and probably never will. But given that they have the world’s largest Internet gaming company (NCSoft), and the world’s greatest broadband density, they probably have thought of it. Now it is our turn. Not that I particularly volunteer or anything. As Adam Warlock once said when he was roleplaying Christ: “My friendship is free and must be freely accepted.” But your friendship may vary.