Weird & Wonderful Wavelengths (Variety Show s1e3)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4jtIDaeaWI

It has been a while

Welcome back to this weird show

Beware the monsters

Somewhere between the blink of an eye and a dissociative episode, the Weird & Wonderful Wavelength oscillates backwards in time. Transposed along the imaginary plane, playing imaginary, we find ourselves in a peculiar black and green room. The striking contrast, jarring sometimes, the pain compels like poking a blister. A mild irritant, a bulging wallet in the back pocket as the waiter lights the absinthe and the green fire and black-burnt sugar drips into the glass. A pyrite spiral, a heckler aggressively ignored, a mild imperfection steals a degree of freedom from an otherwise perfectly composed show. A mildly amusing non-sequitur. 

Reruns

Episode 1

Episode 2

https://twitter.com/TuffGhostArt

A not even quite not-review of Russian Doll Season 2 in all of its amazingness.

Just finished Russian Doll season 2 <Editors Note: This was a while ago! Fortunately we have Spacetime Breaching Technology (TM)>, damn this was incredible. I can't believe more people aren't talking about how good this is. It's kind of uncanny how much it is my jam lol. Like without spoilers, it's got the unfinished corner, metro as metaphor and setting, exploration of self, magical realism, weird high concept scifi. Natasha Lyonne as Nadia is also just like the biggest fucking badass of all time. Like she just does not give a fuck in all the right ways, but also is unafraid to challenge herself. She's just the right amount of deranged, but also no matter how badly she fucks up or delusional she seems, she actually has her shit together and wins at life. And Allan is also this really healthy version of feminine masculinity not played as a joke. He's vulnerable and expressive and even though he's a neurotic wreck he ultimately knows how to take responsibility for himself, however he defines it. I'm not claiming it's as good as Season 1, but it was good in its own right.

Philosophical Soapbox

I was thinking about the nature of "evil", and Boltzmann Brains, and one possibility is that it's kind of like that. There are various evolutionary pressures both ways, and mostly they balance out to a degree of functionality. But given enough complexity i.e. time, improbable events occur and we behave in ways that are not truly rational, even if they maybe work in that myopic moment. That's a way of thinking about the nature of evil that's almost independent of any prescribed ethic.

https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.296781716.3978/flat,750x,075,f-pad,750x1000,f8f8f8.u6.jpg

Psychedelic Pedantry Pastime

P^3 (P-cube): Perpetual Psionic Process: A psionic process is of the mind. Mental processes are multiplicative; the activation of one memory coactivates related memories which reinforce each other; reliving the memory of a psionic process is itself an instantiation of a psionic process, and every other psionic process in memory; a lifetime of psionic processes coactivate as a product across consciousness*spacetime.

More plainly, the idea is that if a psionic process is, by definition, mental in nature, then there is not a meaningful distinction between physical reality and simulated reality- a memory- except that memories can be wrong, can change, and can violate physical assumptions.

When a psionicist reflects on their own thoughts and memories, or times they used their psionic powers, they aren't just remembering those events, they are recreating them, and possibly altering them. It plays into some ideas around quantum animism or consciousness as a set of dimensions alongside the dimensions of space and time.

Psionicists have to be conscious of their thoughts and memories, and how they perceive them. The less structured their mind, the more powerful they become, but it can recurse and multiply beyond their control. Whereas a psionicist with a very structured way of self reflection, and of how they relate their memories and their internal semantics, will not be as powerful, but much more controlled and precise in how they use their abilities.

Last Call

One more cup of coffee for the road, please. There's a kind of ennui, or horror in the mundane, haunting reminiscences, the tension of an unwitting voyeur catching an embarrassing faux pas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mto47BMT3yA

Superheroes pt.X1: Panic Attack

Had a writeup for a different character for a Pt.2, and referenced a superhero team called Panic Attack as a part of that character's backstory, and I want to come back to that character, but I ended up becoming more interested in Panic Attack themselves. I do really like the wiki-style approach from the first one and this kind of free-associated inspiration is exactly what I'm going for (even if I mostly end up just inspiring myself lol), but I ended up doing some really good short-form writeups for them, so I'm just going to roll with that instead, maybe interchange both formats.

Superheroes pt.1: Vision Serpent

Panic Attack are superpowered individuals connected by The Panic Room, which can appear in any time or place. Members of Panic Attack all seem to have powers involving physical or psychological pain.

https://gifer.com/en/VPy8 Rhett Hammersmith (?)

The Itch

The Itch is the most brilliant person you'd ever know, if they could only think straight for a moment. But always it's there, The Itch, just underneath the skin, gnawing and crawling. The worms exist, they've been assured, it's just that no one else can see them. 

The psychic worms of The Itch evoke cosmic entropy like that moment pouring cream into coffee when the tendrils slither.

Peek (created by Semiurge)

Everybody's got an angle - Peek sees them all.

A woman suffering from agoraphobia. She entered the Panic Room, and never left. She's a sort of mission control for Panic Attack, muttering premonitions and observations while she stares into its corners, nodes of mineral intelligence crusted on and outsourced to her cheeks.

I imagine that Peek is never fully seen, only her eye or a portion of her face at any one time, from a viewslit in her Control Room.

Thiotimolina

The magical little girl shining brightly. She says in a tinny voice, "Here's an easy spell that anyone can cast, even you. A spell to flip causality itself. Malicious things may hide in shadows, but shadows are not the cause of malicious things. We make the shadows in which malicious things thrive. All it takes to defeat the malicious things is to smother our shadows; to rest and bask within the light."

Thiotimolina is a fairy of the mineral intelligence. She is an epiphenomenon of the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline.

https://www.deviantart.com/merulagfm/art/Cyborg-Fairy-419432766

I'm gonna be honest I'm still not totally happy with how the "spell" is written, hard to balance evocativeness with logic with symbolism, maybe need to dedicate more time to polish it, but I still love the idea. 

The Man and the Monster

They embrace, a stimulating shock, an aggressive tickle, the primal fear of sitting in a tub of wriggling worms or the urethral penetration of the candiru. Squirming critters morph into butterflies fluttering in the stomach, a bloody new sensation. Beyond absolute terror, a novel awareness. A marriage of convenience gone awry, all with one little mistake. A little mistake called Love.

The Horror Frog

Broken bones, flexing phantom limbs in twisted sockets, sharp weapons cutting both ways, and other ways as well. A metamorphosis, a tadpole racing down a one way stream. A wisdom honed in a mangled form ill suited for anything else.

:= (The Walrus)

A poltergeist, an undead dream, the manifestation of a teeth-related nightmare. Temporarily assigned to haunt the Panic Room.

Hazy Sunset City

A gaseous moon, a city bathed in a hazy sunset. Skyscrapers gently bobbing on magnets and gyroscopes, a city like a lo-fi beat. A disorienting spherical geography, a recursive ouroboric horizon. A sleepy dreamy city, always dusk and always dawn, a soft vibrance, a gentle vibration, a coffee shop nightclub on a warm rainy night with a gentle breeze, a smell of ozone and herbs and tea.

Working on a bigger post but haven't finished it yet, had one more of these little ones, maybe more will come.

On the Shoulders of Giants

A once towering god king, an embodiment of strength, frail and brought to its knees, torn apart and consumed, salvaged for parts. A living idea in its moment of death, trapped in time, trapped in its own myth, upon which we reside.

Rorschach Not-Review

I finally read Tom King's Rorschach and it's really good. I especially like the way he juxtaposed Rorschach's Rorschach with the smiley-face of The Comedian; or Frank Miller's "Dark" with the Silver Age's simplicity, of meaning vs. nothingness but also clarity vs. obfuscation.

I've talked a lot before about the idea of pareidolia, and of how the way perception imposes anthropomorphism onto things could be like a kind of animism, or a control mechanism, a cybernetic interface to the noosphere.

It would be interesting to have something like a pulp hero, a Rorschach type, with a pareidolic mask. A living symbol like Batman claims to be, a force churning through the system of human minds via human bodies like Frankenstein's monster.

Willed into being, something connected to the human experience, a reflection on meaning lacking any of its own.

Designer Personalities

A world of designer drugs of viruses, bacteria, gut microflora, hormones and pheromones and neurotransmitters; leveraging the interaction of mind and body, the idea of a static personality becomes obsolete, identity itself re-constructable. Influencer personalities spread like memes. "The self" as a choice which most reject.

Worlds out of Phase: There is Only Forward Here

Worlds out of phase, passing through moments like walking between the raindrops. Each step a rotation through spacetime, winding forward and backwards like magnetic tape. A wrong step into another dimension, another universe, seamless and a-logical like a dream. Reality as we know it as thin and sharp as a razor's edge, or the needle of a drawing compass.

Imagine like Kokkoku except instead of being stuck in a single moment in time, they slide through moments in time or even other dimensions or universes, out of phase with the rest of reality as we know it.

Always right beside us, yet out of reach. Knock-on effects bottlenecked by three dimensions. A disturbed nexus, an interface, reverberations from unknowable origins.

Splicing frames of reality with each step, a wrong right turn intractably alters the source- there is only forward here.

The Earth's Core is a Mineral Intelligence

The Earth's core is a mineral intelligence, vibrations of sounds and lights and gravity curves rending warbles in time, oozing through geothermal vents in deep ocean, gluttonously exploiting their uncontested ecological niche, blissful, yet prepared, in the deep and dark places, waiting.

Encoded messages, names, written in quantums carved by the pressures of gravity. Glassy glittery splinters, undulations like a whining accordion, splines of spacetime, animations between frames of film, life subliminally.

Disproportioned, stretched grotesquery, funhouse mirror reflection, closer than it appears. It can't be helped.

Non-Euclidean curvatures fold the real and imaginary planes, the creatures kaleidoscope in patterns of impossible colors.

Anomalies abound, snaking wyrms and phosphenes. Anti-patterns, violent vectors, infection, a perverse microverse, magnified in gravity's shadow, a spotlight on the puppet performance.

Mineral bodies fighting holographic infection. Entropic draconic breath crackling, bacterial blue veins, cracked rainbows coated in droplets of regret. We sense the contrast like sharp edges, our shared language of panic and pain, and also pleasure.

Weird Mecha: A Metaphor for Embodied Cognition

This is the second batch of tables/Mecha, see first post here and an explanation of how this word-based Mecha Gear system works here.

Mecha are sometimes described as being a metaphor for the body- which makes sense, they are humanoid giant robots, often unnecessarily anthropomorphized, and often used to tell stories about the adolescent experience or the brutality of war. I don't mean to suggest this is all that Mecha entail, but this alone can be explored in ways that I have rarely if ever seen.

In the first post, the Golem (the MRD2 term for Mecha) were mostly extrapolations of humans as units within greater superorganisms- Entropy Elancer existing partially in the Fourth Wall outside spacetime, Lycaon Strain a macroscopic distributed organism, and Hibernating Hyberia an encrypted civilization.

In this post, I explore the Golem as extrapolations of an individual consciousness and the mind-body connection, which I described as Embodied Cognition in the title although I'm only using that technical term loosely. These Golem are externalizations of thoughts, feelings, states of consciousness and their intermediaries; the biological expressions of them, and how they drive perception.

First, the three tables:

Golem 1 (Emotion + Psychoactivity tables)

CORE: (DREAD + BARBITURATE)

Silent Scream Surf

A perturbation across spacetime; a cry for help never to be answered. A sharply cresting wave crashing and collapsing along the intermediary state of consciousness between terror and resignation. These are its emanations, but it is not the wave, it is the perceptual distortion in the act of surfing along its transient edge.

GEAR1: (LONGING + ANALGESIC)

Karmic Orbitoclast

A blunt but effective solution to resolving Karma but not its root cause. A tool for puncturing, especially through the third eye socket. It will dull the pain of loss and desire, but also any wisdom or joy accrued from it.

GEAR2: (APOLOGETICNESS + DISSOCIATIVE)

Tsunami of Truth Serum

Rising of the multidimensional tide separating consciousness from the corporeal. Those within this dissociated state may finally detach from their pride and guilt and shame, apologizing as much to themselves as others. Though there may be consequences, few regret the release.

GEAR3: (COMPULSION + LIMINALITY)

Exit Field

A glossy forcefield euthanizing those within and trapping them between life and death. There is a thrill in the novelty and immortality of this undead hypo-existence; a compelling and alien perspective. A drug like any other, not to be taken lightly.

Golem 2 (Sensation + Psychoactivity tables)

CORE: (CHEMORECEPTION + CAFFEINE)

Chemysterious Cascader

Convoluted chemical cascade like a Rube Goldbergian neural synapse. A coffee-powered paradox summating serialized events into absurd outcome chains, proportionally as powerful as complex. A mobile platform like a deconstructed humanoid head.

GEAR1: (MIRAGE + ETHANOL)

Porcelain Prayer

Fermented feelings fuel tantalizing truths from a technicolor yawn. In the hazy, yeasty, fruity field of disinhibition, desires supersede reality. This is not always such a bad thing, until the vomitted fuel particles crystallize into shards like slamming jaw-first into porcelain.

GEAR2: (SMELL + DREAM)
Mucus Morpheus Missiles

A slimy schnoz apparatus bursting macroscopic odorant particles fractally extruding, crawling up noses, extracting dreams never to be remembered again. The memories transduced into chemical messages train the Chemysterious Cascader's AI.

GEAR3: (TASTE + SSRI)

Synesthetic Serotonin Starshine

A lolling tongue apparatus beaming starshine. Piercing tendrils seeking slick tongues to rest beneath, inducing bright light synesthestic explosions, washing out emotions and replacing them with a taste like a pina colada on vacation or a big ball of bubble gum in the mouth of a child.

Golem 3 (Emotion + Sensation tables)

CORE: (SCHADENFREUDE + SWEET)

Blue Raspberry Crush

Partially projected collage of ever shifting bodies of many-valued beauty and many uncanny faces smiling with ambiguous intent. An ozone field of artificial fragrances and fresh plastic from flitting cherubic projectors. A hologram simulacra ever on the verge of embrace. An ethereal thirst for touch that cannot be quenched. A sickly aftertaste.

GEAR1: (LOVE + VISION)

Eros Pulse

Beaming waves on broadband frequencies of love, spurned and reflected back like radar. The full tapestry of love and all its shades laid bare. Seen but not touched, yet impactful like a voyeur exposed.

GEAR2: (DISGUST + FORM(PLATONIC))

Love Bomb

Mashing meat and putrid hormonal lubricants and invasive proteins. A suppressed immune response for the sake of carnality. A necessary compromise of the self in service of another. An exchange of spit dribbling down onto the erotic shadow. Lowers inhibitions and opens up those in its exposure to the experience of another, in any genuine sense, and only with mutual consent.

GEAR3: (TENDERNESS + TEXTURE)

Icy Hot Touch

A tingling sensation from a reiki touch. A kaleidoscope of textures like silk and matte and fur. Provides positive pleasure-pain, invigorating but not restoring. A compelling constraint drawing desire, subversively disempowering.

Weird & Wonderful Wavelengths (Variety Show s1e2)

We interrupt this broadcast of the normally scheduled Weird & Wonderful Worlds blog to traverse the other WWW (the Weird Wonderful Wavelength decomposed like an overzealous cockroach in an empty kitchen from the spectrum of nutrient deficient fluorescent white light that is the World Wide Web). Let us begin with an interactive spacetime courtesy of Leenalchi, from the past, present, future, and sidetime of Korea. But watch out... TIGER IS COMING!

Link here if you don't see the embed on mobile

That sure was something folks. Reminds me of my conversation with Gearoong. Horrific psychedelic Scooby-Don't and the Gang hunting Poltergeists in Maximum Recursion Depth (poor Frieda is already an Ashura).

Moving on to RPGs, because that's why you came here... Right? Or maybe not, sound off from the bleachers!

Here's an UNFINISHED Martian Bestiary for TNT which I never posted (Tunnels & Trolls for those of you folk not in the know ;)):

Martian Bestiary

If more than one MR is listed, it is intended as Trivial, Serious, and Deadly, similar to the TNT deluxe book. These are relative, of course. Even a "trivial" dragon is a tough monster.

Psychomancer (Acolyte):

Psychomancer (Vancelord):

Thark (Brute): Often slaves or gladiators, fighting for the chance at freedom, or just for the sake of fighting. Usually they fight with their bare fists or gauntlets, although some ride lizard-horses and other beasts and wield spears and shields. MR 30 / 50 / 75 

Thark (Myrmeleodon): Gladiator champions, warlords, and berserkers. They utilize traps like a huntsman, preferring to create pit traps to shock and separate enemy forces and overpower them by brute force (like an ant-lion). MR 35 / 75 / 110

Radium Legionnaire (Shocktrooper):

Radium Legionnaire (Zeta-Force):

Orange Agent: These martians manipulate Hyperbolic Orange Light to change their appearance, making them excellent spies. The illusion holds along all senses, and their true form may only be revealed in presence of magic fire. MR 15 / 30 / 50

WotW-style Cephalopod Martian:

DC White Martian / Xenomorph:

Tripod: (see Martian Gear) MR 135 / 160 / 185

Flying Saucer (Fighter Class): (See Martian Gear) MR 45 / 135 / 235

Flying Saucer (Destroyer Class): (See Martian Gear) MR 98 / 185 / 400

And now, here's a 5 Minute Challenge I did forever ago and never posted!

The Danger

Tachyons: Particles moving backwards in time. The tachyons were weaponized. Their presence creates butterfly effects, culminating in chaos fields, paradox-like masses of entropy, spacetime violently correcting for itself in a recursive loop that outpaces itself.

Psychofields: Electromagnetic wave transmission, specifically engineered to tamper with human consciousness. The signal is not subtle, but when cognition itself is altered, it doesn't matter one way or another. It is a collective madness, one which cannot be falsified. It may as well be real.

Antiwaves: Inverse frequency waves. The mathematical imaginary plane actualized in physical spacetime. Like realizing you've been seeing in two dimensions your whole life, discovering the third, only to realize you can't perceive the second dimension anymore.

I only came up with three of them, and I feel like they dip into themes I've explored before, and the writing is mediocre at best, but I guess it's something. What can you expect in 5 minutes?

Alright Alright let's wrap this up, the children need to be put to bed and the babysitter's getting antsy. Let's end with an open-mic poem and a song for the road.

so much to think about and do and see

an itch to scratch and tear until it bleeds

and yet its all so stifling to me

to bring in brief relief to unmet needs

to nonetheless deny the way this feels

it would be nice to rid myself of this

to win is not to spin again my wheels

instead of hell to dwell in love and bliss

What utter beauty, I am moved to tears, TO TEARS! Well folks, it's been fun as always. Maybe the next Weird & Wonderful Wavelength will be less than a year away. Anyway, just so we can enjoy these final moments together a little longer (and wipe away those tears), how about a coffee break?