I hope you all had a wonderful Black Friday.
Ah, yes. Black Friday is the most recent of the American customs that have leaked into my native Norway over the Internet, along with classics like Helloween and VD. I am not sure whether this actually is the first year I’ve seen it here, but it just might be. The name certainly seems well chosen from the perspective of the porcupines among us, don’t you think? ^_^
Well, to be honest I am more precisely thankful to be Norwegian and live in Norway, the world’s best country for years now according to the UN. Those who live in Congo, Somalia or even Colombia probably regard the USA as pretty much Heaven on Earth, and not entirely without reason. But the disturbing fact is that for years now, the US has been in decline, while the world as a whole has been growing healthily. Even after the onset of the Financial Crisis, the emerging economies (much of what used to be the Third World) have been growing at a brisk pace.
What is more important is that the growth in the emerging economies is largely real growth, caused by investment in infrastructure such as roads, railroads, education and telecommunication. In contrast, the growth in America has for a long time now been false growth, caused by growing consumption based on borrowing. Â The “dotcom” bubble was quickly replaced with a housing bubble, which exploded spectacularly in the so-called Financial Crisis, impacting many other rich countries to some degree. But what is less obvious yet is that this was followed by yet another bubble, which is still growing: The government bubble.
The government is issuing ever more debt, and we are now talking about truly astronomical amounts, where trillions come and go. There is no plan, not even a vague idea, for how to pay back any of this. In fact, there is no plan for how to stop borrowing, ever. In fact, there seems to be no one who sees this as a need, or even a goal, or even a possibility. It is assumed that for the foreseeable future, America and its government will be financed by borrowing.
Unfortunately, that means the foreseeable future is getting shorter.
Unbelievable as it may seem, there are over 6.5 billion humans who don’t particularly think that the US is God’s chosen  country and is entitled to getting money for nothing. But as long as everyone else is also playing along, as long as you can sell American debt or use it as collateral as if it were gold, it is in everyone’s interest to continue to lend. The day someone big throws the cards and back out of this charade, it will be quite unpleasant to live in America for a while.
Not that it is particularly pleasant now, from what my friends there tell me. High unemployment has become a feature and is taking its toll: There are still many people slowly unwinding their life savings while trying to get a new job, even one that pays less than they used to have. There are still people living in houses they cannot really pay the mortgage for, putting off bills and racking up credit card debt while they hope for better times. But the better times don’t always show up, and so people slowly sink down into poverty. Neighborhoods gradually turn into slums. Schools deteriorate and teachers are fired.
Meanwhile, police is beating up protesters on a regular basis, and public parks are becoming like Palestinian refuge camps, permanent spots of squalor and anger.  In several states, recording police brutality has itself become a crime punishable with years in prison. Some of the latest police crackdowns seem to have been organized on a federal level, something that is against the constitution. (Let us leave aside whether or not it is a good idea to beat up leftists, in  principle, if they give the slightest excuse to do so.)
The culture war goes on, with the enmity between “blue” and “red” growing ever stronger, slowly inching toward an actual civil war with blood on the streets. (Not that the streets in America are free from blood even at the best of times, with the violent crime in the country being several times higher than in other first-world countries, and a general acceptance that you choose to risk your life if you walk into areas populated by people of a different skin color.) While the economy is in chaos, and infrastructure falling apart, the political parties are latching on to obscure pet projects that serve little or no useful function, but simply demonstrate their loyalty to their side of the culture war.
It is not that many years since people around the world looked up to America as a shining example of what a modern society should be. But something has gone horribly wrong. I would be surprised if it is not the same thing that always goes horribly wrong with every empire that has a golden age: Hubris. Overweening pride. A sense of being entitled to privilege. Well, at least you had your days in the sun. I hope you enjoyed them. Your golden age is over – so say your analysts.
A magical world, still in the process of being defined into its true form.
This is a bunch of internal notes for one of my fantasy stories, so it is only of interest for the extremely curious with a particular penchant for that kind of literature, I guess. Still, if I am writing it anyway, I may as well write it here in case that combination of interest really exists out there. There are 7 billion people in the world, after all.
***
So, Oktagonien. It is the name that corresponds to Earth in this particular story. Actually it has many different names in different languages, but the Emperors (human visitors) call it Oktagonien because they reach it through a pattern consisting of two octagons one inside another, each with different markings. In The 1001st Book (which will probably have a different name if I work long enough on this since I already used that name in the Thoth story), the two octagons are depicted side by side. Only by drawing the smaller inside the larger can you open the path to Oktagonien. And the book is only given to one person at a time, well at least recently.
Unfortunately you cannot travel back the same way, so you cannot return to Earth – and the universe Earth is in – without learning the Secret of the Return, which will typically take many years. The current visitor, however, somehow passed through the octagon first in his dream, which means he returns to the more real world when he wakes up. That, however, is not often.
Time flows differently in Oktagonien. A rough approximation is that it moves one thousand times as fast, so one year on Earth is 1000 years in Oktagonien. (It is probably 1024, if we use astronomical years and ignore the whole leap year thing.) Oktagonien was created by ascended humans (or the metaphysical equivalent) in a sister universe of ours (or rather of the main character’s), so Oktagonien is basically a niece universe. As such, it is less real, more fluid, more magical, more random, and more malleable. And time flows much faster, like in a dream. In fact, in a certain sense it is a dream, but it feels quite real when inside it. Then again, so do dreams.
One day (24 hours) on Earth is approximately 2.8 years in the world of Oktagonien, so if you sleep for a bit over 8 hours you’d spend a year inside Oktagonien.
The inhabitants of Oktagonien are furries, anthropomorphic animals. Or at least that is the case now and on the twin continent, where our hero lands. The western continent is inhabited by dog-people, who are strong and brave and quite social. Their southern subcontinent is inhabited by mouse-people, who are pygmies, but the smartest of the three races. East of the strait is the continent of the cat-people. In the frozen lands to the north and on mountain ranges live the spider-people, who are not all that spidery really but have some traits that may remind one of spiders, like four long, thin arms and four eyes, three in front and one in the back of the head.
The previous hero, the New Emperor, is the hero of the book our main character reads before travelling to Oktagonien. Inside Oktagonien, the New Emperor arrived a bit over 2000 years ago, so the book must be no more than two years old. He saved the furries from a large-scale invasion of the spider people, who had been unknown in the lands before. The spiders still live in the north, but are no longer considered a threat.
The spider invasion happened after the three races bombed each other back to the stone age in the Great War of Destruction, some 2500 years ago. The Great War was followed by a century of chaos, where people fought over magical artifacts from the past but ended up killing the only people who knew how to maintain them or even use them. After this they got used to living in the stone age, and the population was just beginning to bounce back when the spiders arrived with their superior alchemy and enslaved the furries. The spiders are very sensitive to heat and cannot stay long in the south or in the lowlands without constantly using potions to cool themselves down. Now that they no longer have a monopoly on alchemy, they live only in the coldest parts of the land and give no trouble.
Before the Great War of Destruction was what the book calls the Age of Legends, but which is now called the Age of Myth. The current Age of Legend is the rule of the New Emperor, which common people have already taken to be identical to the Eternal Emperor, who lived in the era before the Great War. He was called so because he ruled for several hundred years. When he left, however, his empire only lasted for a few generations before the civil war destroyed it.
The current hero, the New Emperor and the Eternal Emperor were all humans from Earth, and speaking English. However, the furries speak their own languages which our hero magically learns in a couple days, what with him being a moderately supreme being in this lower world.
Only about 500 years passed between the leaving of the Eternal Emperor and the coming of the New Emperor, so it is perhaps not so strange that people 2000 years later begin to think they were the same person. The Eternal Emperor arrived some 3500 years ago. He forged the Empire and raised civilization to a very high level, but evidently that was not such a good idea, since the furries used their advanced magic in the Great War of Destruction.
Before these Emperors, some myth-shrouded human arrived around 10,000 years ago. This hero is today considered a god. I am not quite sure what he did, but he did not create the furries. They were supposedly created by the twin gods who came before him, some 18,000 years ago. Through overwhelming magic, they transformed animals into the current sapient races. The furries today don’t know that this happened 18,000 years ago, but there are remnants from the Golden Age that contain clues to this. As far as we know, the twin gods – one male and one female – were the first humans to arrive in Oktagonien.
However, they were not the creators of Oktagonien, nor its first visitors. Before the coming of the first humans, there were the Elder Gods. They created the Elder Races, which probably includes the spider people, unless they were some failed experiment of the Twins. The elder races live on other continents. They are sentient, but are less similar to each other than the anthropomorphs.
Oktagonien has had intelligent life for at least 50 000 years, and empires have risen and fallen repeatedly in many ways and in many places. Generally a civilization is either created or saved by an avatar from a higher world, first from the mother world and now the last 18,000 years from the aunt world of Earth.
Has the mother world given up on Oktagonien and abandoned it? Or have they given it to our world as a gift, or possibly as a test? I can’t answer that yet. Only when my hero uncovers the ruins of the age before the age of the gods, may we possibly find out more about the mysterious people of the mother world.
***
Summary of the ages:
Age of Legend: Started by the New Emperor, 2200 years ago.
Age of Myth (the previous Age of Legend): Started by the Eternal Emperor, 3500 years ago.
The Golden Age: Started by the Great God (alias the Young God) 10,000 years ago. The first known Empire.
Age of Gods: Started by the Twin Gods 18,000 years ago. The creation of the Three Races. Fading into the era of the Lesser Gods, who are variously believed to be heroic furries, or descendants of the Twins, or heroic furry descendants of the Twins.
Age of the Elder Gods: Pre-human civilizations reaching at least 50,000 years back in time, possibly twice that or more. The creation of the Elder Races. Avatars from the mother world.
***
Oktagonien is a world very rich in magic, but the magic seems to vary both by time and by place, and perhaps to be gradually fading. There may be a single underlying principle that fuels all magic, but if so, nobody alive knows what it is. Perhaps it is only visible for someone from outside…
In the past, you could get away with just about anything by saying “The Word of God”. These days, you can get the same effect by saying “Climate Change”. People will focus on whether or not they believe, not on whether or not what you say makes sense.
American politics are unique, as far as I know, in that the very fact of man-made climate change is a political issue. Not whether it is a bad thing or what to do about it, but the actual temperature measurements, not to mention the models used to predict future changes.
In a way it is understandable that American conservatives flat out deny man-made climate change. After all, liberals believe in it. In the current poisonous political atmosphere (which is far more dangerous to the country that whatever happens in the physical atmosphere), if your opponent claims the moon is not made of cheese, it probably means they have secret plans to eat it.
There is also the unfortunate tendency for an unholy alliance of progressive politicians and mass media to hype current weather aberrations as proof of climate change. But the truth is that we have literally seen nothing yet: The world is slowly heating up, but from a record low in the 17th century. These things literally happen at a glacial speed, as glaciers are a big player in the process. So we are now back to around the Viking age in temperature, and the Bronze Age was warmer than that, and the late Stone Age warmer than that again. So we have literally not seen anything yet that hasn’t been there already.
In the past, singular weather events like a bad storm or a year of drought were hyped by religious groups as divine punishment. The current behavior is essentially the same, God being replaced by a more nebulous force. But it is still some higher force punishing us for our greed, and people react in much the same way: Not very much at all, since people generally like their greed.
Again, we have literally seen nothing new yet, but we are probably past the point of no return where we will see change on a whole new level – some day in the future when gas-driven cars seem as quaint as horse-driven carriages. And by then, it would probably have changed anyway, either becoming hotter or colder or wetter or drier. So conservatives are perfectly right to redefine “climate change denier” as “someone who, despite overwhelming proof, refuses to believe that the climate has always been changing.”
A hot summer or cold winter or a particularly devastating tornado or three are weather, not climate. But these are the things that get attention, and the press is adding to the confusion. The press – and presumably TV, for those dumb enough to watch that – is trying to stir up intense emotions, because that’s what sells. Spring coming two, then three weeks earlier to Norway or Canada is not going to compete with the latest sex scandal or grotesque murder. You have to have cities swallowed by the ocean and stuff, so that’s the angle you get. But then you come to the beach and it is exactly where it was last year, and it is kind of hard not to dismiss the whole thing as a hoax.
It is not a hoax. Science has known for over 200 years that carbon dioxide retains heat, because it lets light through but scatters infrared (heat) radiation. Light comes down during the day, and is absorbed to some degree by any surface that is not pure white (or a mirror), more the darker the surface. Light that is absorbed does not disappear, but is radiated as heat. (This can take its sweet time if it is absorbed by plants, of course, since these must be eaten or burned or some such to release the heat. And a lot of the planet is covered in plants, but they actually store only a minor part of the energy that hits them. Nobody calls for more efficient plants though. There are actual differences even between existing species, without genetic engineering.)
So if we increase the carbon dioxide and methane content in the atmosphere, it will hold back more of the heat that would otherwise radiate into space. This is what these gases do and they can’t help it. You can see them in action on our sister planets Venus and Mars, and the atmosphere already keeps Earth 19 Kelvin warmer than it otherwise would be, which is very much a good thing. That’s why nobody complained during those 200 years that we already knew about the greenhouse effect. Even children could read about this in any serious book on astronomy, and it was in no way controversial. It shouldn’t be now.
What should be controversial is the notion that if the planet is getting hotter, we need more socialism, more taxes and more regulations of everything from banks to children’s books. Seriously? No, seriously? If we are facing a massive environmental challenge, don’t we need the most flexible economy we could possibly have? History has already shown us just how great socialism is to protect the environment: It left Eastern Europe an ugly, poisoned dystopia at a point where the forests were already beginning to spread again in North America. If your house is on fire, you don’t call for a pyromaniac. If your environment is in trouble, you don’t call for socialism.
Now, don’t get this wrong. Taxing carbon dioxide emissions is a perfectly reasonable approach, if you think your country will suffer from the global warming. (If you think it will profit from it, that’s a bit different. Scandinavia, Canada, and Siberia will probably all benefit greatly from an ice-free Arctic, for instance.) Taxing carbon emissions from the industry might cause the industry to move elsewhere, so is somewhat less efficient than taxing gas-driven cars or coal-driven power plants. But you can still tax goods on the border for the carbon dioxide emissions made during production. There is nothing controversial about this from a fiscal conservative point of view. Taxing negative externalities is a staple of conservative economic theory, believe it or not. Â Laissez-faire does not actually extend to looking the other way when someone dumps their garbage in their neighbor’s backyard.
So yeah, most countries will probably want to tax carbon fuel in order to discourage its use, but should then pass this money back to the people by cutting other taxes or subsidizing positive externalities (like painting your house white, installing solar cells etc). There is no reason to use it to finance your weird culture wars. Â Stop doing that, so people can take you seriously.
Still on vacation in Skyrim, the mythical home of the Nords. Perhaps this picture will explain why.
Still on vacation in Skyrim, the mythical home of the Nords. Perhaps this picture will explain why.
Still on vacation in Skyrim, the mythical home of the Nords. Perhaps this picture will explain why.
Still on vacation in Skyrim, the mythical home of the Nords. Â Perhaps this picture will explain why.
Still on vacation in Skyrim, the mythical home of the Nords. Â Perhaps this picture will explain why.
Hello, I am your new hero. May I come in? What, you only accept catgirls? Well, perhaps next time then.
This entry is about a computer game, so not very interesting. It may tell a little about the game, a little about the state of the world in 2011, and perhaps more than I intended about myself. Not very interesting, as I said.
I must admit that my first character was largely inspired by my experience with the two previous games in the series, and particularly the last of them, Oblivion from 2006. Since they run on the same hardware, and come from the same company, I assumed they would be fairly similar. My experience at level 16 is that yes, they are fairly similar.
There are one huge difference, in theory: This game has done away with classes entirely (well, except college classes at the magical college, but even then I only ever attended one, and it was quite informal.)
Now, what you do decides who you become. There are no “major” and “minor” skills. The different races (or possibly species in some cases) have different starting skills, but only to a modest degree. Most skills start at 15, with 20 when you have a racial bonus. Since any skill can be raised to 100 (I think, I have not come near that) you pretty much decide your own class by doing what you prefer. If you pick enough locks, your skill in lockpicking goes up. If you block enough attacks, your blocking goes up. (It also rises faster the harder the attacks you block, but that seems to be a bit of a special case.) If you cast enough spells of a certain type, you increase your skill with that and similar spells.
After enough skill gains (seems to be around 10?) you gain a level and can choose to increase either your health, your stamina, or your magic. That is pretty much the only part that is detached from your actual practice: You can bash on wolves for the entire level and never cast a spell, yet raise you magic. So that is an exception.
You can also pick “perks” within each skill. For instance I have several perks by now in blocking and heavy armor. However, each perk is associated with a minimum skill level, so I cannot for instance get perks in Destruction magic, where I am still a newbie.
So, at level 16, what kind of character have I become? Basically what we in City of Heroes call a “tanker” – the invulnerable guy or gal who wades in first and takes all the beating and remains standing, while the rest of the team does damage from a safe distance or from the flanks. I have a high block skill and heavy armor skill, a decent one-handed weapon skill, and an pretty good summoning skill (I have summoned a spectral wolf to assist me since the beginning of the game). Now that I have a follower (Lydia the housecarl), I can concentrate on blocking their attacks while Lydia and the wolf whale on them (or in the case of the wolf, wail on them) from the flanks. This works pretty well. If they turn on my companions, I use my weapon to convince them otherwise.
Life in the game became a lot easier once I qualified for the Quick Reflexes perk in blocking, by the way. This perk causes time to slow down when the enemy makes a power attack while I block. A power attack is a particular intense and dangerous attack that takes a moment of preparation to perform and drains far more stamina than other attacks. Players can also do this. But with the quick reflex perk, I can actually see when such an attack is beginning, and try to step back or slide aside. If the terrain allows and the attacker is not extremely fast, I can avoid the power attack entirely. This saves quite a bit in potions.
Yes, you can heal yourself with potions during the game, and even with eating stuff from your inventory. (That seems like a glitch, really, but the potions are strictly necessary to survive some of the opponents you meet.) On the other hand you cannot cast self-heal spells during battle. Well, you can, but that leaves you wide open for attacks. So in hard fights, I wait with the potions until there is an actual risk of defeat within the next few hits, to save on potions. Once the battle is over, I can heal easily with magic. And before the battle begins, I cast an Oak skin spell that adds to my defense, along with the heavy armor and the shield.
So who is this main battle tank? Is it a Redguard soldier, the dark-skinned desert and jungle people known for their superior fighting skills and adrenaline rush? Or perhaps a blond Nord berserker, also with some inborn fighting skills? Neither – in the game, I am a red-haired Breton woman with a slightly chubby and innocent-looking face. Although the menacing horned helmet does hide part of that, and the heavy armor barely even lets you see that it might be a female in the first place. For those who want to play a female character to have a nice backside to look at, I recommend finding another game. Even in underwear, the difference between the sexes is understated compared to the real world. Well, certainly my part of the real world.
So far, she is doing reasonably well, although I never know for sure when I go into a dungeon whether I will be able to clear it out or have to withdraw with my tail between my legs. Except Bretons don’t have tails. I wonder if I should make a magical catgirl next. Wait, that’s the anime talking. But you can do that in Skyrim, actually. The Khajjiits are a cat-like race, complete with fur and tail. But they are not nearly as cute as Japanese catgirls and catboys. Perhaps that will be fixed in The Elder Scrolls VI? For if the nice people at Bethesda Softworks are still up and about in five more years, there is every reason to think they will improve on their success, as they have done since 1996.
Whether I will still play games at that time, nobody knows, not even I. Perhaps I have become too saintly for such things by then. Or if not, perhaps at least I will have stopped undressing my fallen enemies and placing them in compromising poses with the local wildlife.