Anima Concept Crafting: Pokemon-like TTRPG Game Design Pattern by way of Animism

Following up on my "Animism Appendix N" for my still unnamed "Pariah by way of Maximum Recursion Depth" setting (although the setting might be running away from that a bit...), this is a game design pattern using Concept Crafting for Anima, the spirits of things, from an Animist perspective. I'm still deciding whether / how the setting will be some combination of modern, the imprecise state between paleo/neolithic, or post post apocalyptic, so this is written in a setting neutral manner, but all of it assumes a dream-like, surreal, psychedelic, Weird World.

Appendix N aside, it's also inspired by Shaman King (almost too literally...), Pokemon, Megaman Battle Network, the Dane Komljen movie Afterwater, and the Rolando Klein movie Chac: Dios de la Lluvia.

In Worldbuilding with Pokemon I actually tapped into this idea quite a while ago, I even specifically make the Shaman King and MMBN connections and the connection of Pokemon as like nature spirits, but this takes it in a more specifically Animist direction, which works even better.

As mentioned in that post as well, my old micro-settings I-Cons, Monsters and Madmen, and maybe even Stonepunk Adventures (as Enziramire keeps reminding me!), may be influencing this setting as well.

This setting, and by extension this Anima Concept Crafting system, reflects ideas I'd had well before I really had any meaningful understanding of Animism. It's really cool how we can converge on all of these big ideas from multiple directions, and also how each brings some new facet, or makes certain aspects more salient.

Shaman King. Never finished this manga when I was younger but it deeply influenced me. The recent anime on Netflix was just ok. I suspect the manga is better, but also that it's probably not quite as good as I remember it either. One could argue there's dicey stuff around cultural representation and appropriation, but I think it was coming from a good place.

Some previous Concept Crafting posts

Mecha Gear Concept Crafting

Gematria (Jewish Mysticism) Concept Crafting and Divination

Science Fantasy Mecha PoC Game with Pregens

MRD Vol. 2 Campaign Play Reports

Anima and The Dreaming

NOTE: None of this has been playtested, and I'm sure much of the terminology and other particulars will change over time or be adapted for the setting as I build it out.

There is a will in all things, the Anima. A rock, lake, animal, person, idea, celestial body, divine being; all of these things have Anima. The Dreaming are curious, they ponder the universe; they see the beauty in the interconnectedness of things, and in understanding the nature of these interconnected systems. Most people acknowledge the Anima, and perhaps 10% of the population are among the Dreaming, developing Relationships with Anima and Manifesting as a way of life. The only thing separating the Dreaming from the rest, is the willingness to Manifest.

When a Dreamer develops a Relationship with or Manifests an Anima, they are not expressing dominance or ownership over the material origin of the Anima. Manifesting requires understanding, a submission to the will of the Anima; at its worst, a kind of para-social relationship. Even so, given the interconnectedness of things, the Manifestation of Anima can materially effect its origin; there is a balance of power, a dance or ongoing conversation, between the Dreamer and the Anima they Manifest, and also to its material origin. Every time an Anima is Manifested, its true nature changes, even if just a little bit.

Anima

Anima are composed of WORDs, the number of words corresponding to their level. The power of Anima scale geometrically by level at base 2, i.e. a level 1 Anima has a power of 2, level 2 has a power of 4, level 3 has a power of 8, and level 4 has a power of 16; however, these numbers don't effect rolls, it's merely conceptual.

Level 1 Anima (Power 2)

One WORD. Trivial or circumstantial, may be Manifested at no cost and don't require an ongoing Relationship. Manifesting the flavor of a MEAL, the number of skips of a ROCK tossed against a body of water, the LUCK of the draw.

Level 2 Anima (Power 4)

Two WORDs. Manifested through some object of personal importance or utility like a staff (STRENGTH+SUPPORT), pair of glasses (SALIENCE+GLASS), fetish/token (LUCK+FOCUS), utility knife (UTILITY+KNIFE), etc. 

They may be used freely, and are integrated into daily life. 

There is no limit on the number of level 2 Anima Relationships, but they must be Manifested in some meaningful way at least once every three sessions or else the Relationship is Broken (if the Player can't remember, they're Broken, so keep track!).

Level 3 Anima (Power 8)

Three WORDs. Manifested through spiritual communion with a superorganism, a collective consciousness representing one or more other Anima as an Anima in itself. A lake (LOVE+WONDER+TRANSIENCE), apex predator (HUNT+FEED+BALANCE), or venerated ancestor (DEEP+TIME+GIANT). 

Level 3 Anima may be Manifested with the passing of seasons (i.e. once per season). Usually, they require some sacrifice, appeasement, or quest. 

There is no limit on the number of level 3 Anima Relationships, but after Manifesting any one level 3 Anima, all other level 3 Anima Relationships are Broken.

Level 4 Anima (Power 16)

Four WORDs. As with Level 3, these are superorganisms Manifested through spiritual communion, but also requiring greater material cost; the attainment of many rare commodities, the recruitment of true believers or a greater number of paid workers or an even greater number of those servicing under the threat of violence. Freedom (INFINITY+CHAOS+IMAGINATION+UNKNOWN), Economy (MONEY+TRADE+ENCRYPTION+VALUE), Community (PEOPLE+SOUL+SELF+OTHER). 

Level 4 Anima may be Manifested as one crosses forks in the roads of life (perhaps once a decade, or reflecting some major life transition). 

A Dreamer may have only one level 4 Anima Relationship at any one time.

Although the material origin of an Anima influences its level, ultimately the level is determined by the Relationship between the Dreamer and the Anima. It is possible to have a low-level Anima with a profound material origin if the Relationship is trivial or para-social, and likewise it is possible to have a high-level Anima with a simple material origin, if the Relationship runs deeply enough.

Megaman Battle Network, a more scifi/modern take on the idea, no less valid. Megaman Star Force didn't hit the same tho.

Anima Concept Crafting

While not the exclusive means of building Anima Relationships, Concept Crafting may be used to create Anima.

Anima Crafting

Any two Anima of the same level may be combined into an Anima of the same or one higher level by taking at least one WORD from each Anima, and for creating level 3 Anima or higher, at least one new WORD inspired by the context or by the interconnectedness of the two component Anima.

Crafting a level 2 Anima may require a day or a few days, level 3 Anima a moderate quest, and level 4 a paradigm-shifting, life-changing adventure.

Anima Mutation

Given the interconnectedness of things, any time an Anima is Manifested, its very nature is subtly changed. Likewise, if the material origin of the Anima is itself changed, depending on the degree of change or how aware the Dreamer is of the change, this may also cause Mutation. Manifesting two Anima within temporal proximity frequently, or any Anima Manifested under some extreme or traumatic context, is likely to Mutate. 

This merely involves replacing one (or more) WORDs of the Anima with one from or inspired by the other Anima, or the context.

Examples

"What Would Taylor Swift Do" Charm (DISTANCE+LOVE): Manifests an Anima of Taylor Swift, whose wisdom is based on the para-social relationship between the Dreamer and Taylor Swift. While the real Taylor Swift would not acknowledge the Relationship, often her actions will align (or notably fail to align) with the nature of the Anima.

Anaglyph 3D Glasses (DIMENSION+PERSPECTIVE): Red and Cyan anaglyph 3D glasses that when Manifested allow one to frequency-modulate into the Positive and Negative Planes. Each lens has a different flavor of Anima, one more manic, and one more depressive.

Twin Mask of Play and Win (PLAY+WIN): A mask of two faces merged together, one of the iconoclastic spirit of Play (dolphin face), and the other the disciplined spirit of Win (dragon face). Manifests as suggestions like the Devil and Angel over the shoulder.

Serenity Plugs (SERENITY+NOTHING): Waxen earplugs Manifesting an Anima like the shadow of sound. An inner peace deriving from the absence of sound and a willingness to absolve oneself of willful action.

Cancer Carapace (ABOMINATION+INEVITABILITY): Carapace armor crafted from a large aquatic arthropod. Manifests as the mutant monster Cancer, an Anima of a pitiable abomination. Empowered by acts of humility and love in the face of perceived evil.

Forgiveness Bow (ACCURACY+REGRET): A bow that will always hit its mark, but its mark is driven by the unconscious of the wielder. The bow Manifests as a time Anima, a frozen moment infinitely trapped between being an non-being.

Dragon Quest Monsters. Watabou, that little fuzzy blue guy, is actually plant-type, and if I remember correctly, one of the hardest monsters to get, one of the most powerful, and was strongly implied to be some kind of eldritch god, and I love that for him. Dragon Quest Monsters is Pokemon by way of Akira Toriyama (creator of Dragon Ball), with a really interesting monster breeding (in later games fusion) system, and it was awesome, I really loved these games when I was younger.

Summary

Probably unconsciously inspired by Shaman King long before I made the conscious connection, but also my general love of the collecting and generative/crafting aspects of Pokemon-likes (even more emblematically, Dragon Quest Monsters), and of settings where humans have personal relationships with "magical" beings (including Megaman Battle Network in this), it seemed logical to me to combine the Pokemon-like gameplay loop with Animism.

I like this philosophically as well, in that while one could choose to simply treat it as a re-flavored Pokemon-like if one so chose, because of the nature of Relationships and Manifesting, there is an intentional emphasis on this system as not one of ownership and conquest, but of intra- and inter-personal examination, which is obviously my jam.

Pokemon-likes in TTRPGs tend to struggle because of the multiplicative complexity it imposes on other gameplay mechanics, or even in rules-light form, it's just a lot for any Player or GM to keep track of.

Given the soft-limitations on Anima, that any level 2 Anima must be Manifested at least once every three sessions, that Manifesting any level 3 Anima Breaks the Relationships with all other level 3 Anima, the way acquiring Anima generally involves some kind of quest, I'm hoping it will lend itself naturally to a certain balance, but it will likely need to be tweaked during playtesting.

I allude to the philosophical aspects of Animism more in the Appendix N, and in future posts I'll discuss the setting and by extension philosophy in more detail, but this post is focused on this Anima Concept Crafting game design pattern.

Considerations

1. I've intentionally chosen not to use the word Shaman, or Druid for that matter. I had originally wanted to call the "Dreamers" the Wisdom, but since I use Wisdom as an Ability Score in MRD I wasn't sure I wanted to commit to that term. Dreams tend to hold a lot of significance in Animism and other kinds of spiritualism, but I dunno for some reason it feels maybe too generic or too corny, I'm just not sure how I feel about it.

2. I'm very comfortable with Concept Crafting and the abstractness of the Anima as presented here, and also in calling them Anima, but I'm not sure if I'm overly limiting myself with the levels of Anima and some of the constraints in terms of the gameplay loop.

Also, you know I intentionally chose not to include a Pokemon image in a post where I specifically call it a Pokemon-like because that is how I roll.

How to Count to 31 on One Hand

I was reading The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, a really funny and clever comic from a while back, and it reminded me of a cute, but also really cool trick, for counting on one hand.

Imagine from pinky to thumb, that the value of each finger doubles:

  Pinky = 1
  Ring = 2
  Middle = 4
  Index = 8
  Thumb = 16

And each finger can be either Up/On (1), or Down/Off (0).

So let's start counting. I show it as multiplication and addition here, as vectors, but you can just hold up your hand, or lay it on a surface like a keyboard or piano, whatever makes sense for you, and just feel it on your fingers.

1: 1(1) + 2(0) + 4(0) + 8(0) + 16(0) = 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 1
2: 1(0) + 2(1) + 4(0) + 8(0) + 16(0) = 0 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 2 

Simple enough so far. You can see from the ones and zeroes, it's just the position of your fingers. But what about 3, a number that you don't have a finger for? Just set your pinky and ring finger both to the ON position.

3: 1(1) + 2(1) + 4(0) + 8(0) + 16(0) = 1 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 3

And numbers larger than what we have fingers for, like 17? Pinky and thumb are ON, the rest are OFF.

17: 1(1) + 2(0) + 4(0) + 8(0) + 16(1) = 1 + 0 + 0 + 16 = 17

Normally when we think of numbers, we think of Arabic Numerals in Base 10, meaning 0 through 9, with 10, 20, 30, ..., 100, etc., as like the next iteration.

When we use this approach, we're counting in Base 2, also known as Binary. If we think of our fingers each as representing binary states, we can infer the value just from 0's and 1's. But, understanding the relationship between Base 10 and Base 2 visually and kinesthetically through our fingers makes it easier to understand.

In other words, starting from 0, we can think of each finger as representing 2** (to the power of) the incrementing values of our fingers:

  1: 2**0 == Pinky
  2: 2**1 == Ring
  4: 2**2 == Middle
  8: 2**3 == Index
  16: 2**4 == Thumb

So instead of:

17: 1(1) + 2(0) + 4(0) + 8(0) + 16(1) = 1 + 0 + 0 + 16 = 17

We can just represent it as:

17: 1 0 0 0 1

As I was reading the comic, I couldn't help but start counting from 0 to 31, it was just fun to do, even meditative. It took a bit of effort at first, but now I can usually on two hands get to 128 fairly trivially. Going from 128 to 256 I usually end up losing focus or making a mistake somewhere along the way, but it's still really fun!

Here is our full table:

  n:   1 2 4 8 16
  0:   0 0 0 0 0
  1:   1 0 0 0 0
  2:   0 1 0 0 0
  3:   1 1 0 0 0
  4:   0 0 1 0 0
  5:   1 0 1 0 0
  6:   0 1 1 0 0
  7:   1 1 1 0 0
  8:   0 0 0 1 0
  9:   1 0 0 1 0
  10:  0 1 0 1 0
  11:  1 1 0 1 0
  12:  0 0 1 1 0
  13:  1 0 1 1 0
  14:  0 1 1 1 0
  15:  1 1 1 1 0
  16:  0 0 0 0 1
  17:  1 0 0 0 1
  18:  0 1 0 0 1
  19:  1 1 0 0 1
  20:  0 0 1 0 1
  21:  1 0 1 0 1
  22:  0 1 1 0 1
  23:  1 1 1 0 1
  24:  0 0 0 1 1
  25:  1 0 0 1 1
  26:  0 1 0 1 1
  27:  1 1 0 1 1
  28:  0 0 1 1 1
  29:  1 0 1 1 1
  30:  0 1 1 1 1
  31:  1 1 1 1 1

Or, on our hands:

First image I found on google images. They went the opposite direction (thumb -> pinky) rather than what I said but it amounts to the same thing. You can also reverse the up and down if your pinky is capable of that, and then you get cool ninja / spiderman / punkrock handsigns. Whatever works for you, have fun with it.

During my Insight Fellowship after leaving academia, I struggled to learn a lot of the algorithmic and other computer science and software engineering fundamentals that I needed for industry. I didn't have the training and it definitely didn't come to me intuitively. Another Fellow in the group who had a much deeper intuition towards algorithms would often help me study, and one of the algorithms he worked through with me was in converting a decimal (number) to a binary representation. Rather than counting on my hands (honestly that may have been better...), I came to understand the algorithm as a vector representation, just another way of getting at the same thing, but either way, in so doing, a lot of things clicked into place for me. Not just how to write algorithms, but how to understand mathematical relationships, and in understanding aspects of natural philosophy, or how the universe works.

Imagine a World where people counted this way. What kind of culture would this be? What would be their myths, laws, philosophies, arts, and sciences?

There are other ways to reconceptualize numbers physically. This system is in Base 20, and computations can be inferred from the physical relationship between strokes:

A Number System Invented by Inuit Schoolchildren

Imagine a world where people counted this way? You don't have to imagine it.

From the article linked above:

The Alaskan Inuit language, known as Iñupiaq, uses an oral counting system built around the human body. Quantities are first described in groups of five, 10, and 15 and then in sets of 20. The system “is really the count of your hands and the count of your toes,”...

Because of the tally-inspired design, arithmetic using the Kaktovik numerals is strikingly visual. Addition, subtraction and even long division become almost geometric. The Hindu-Arabic digits are an awkward system, Bartley says, but “the students found, with their numerals, they could solve problems a better way, a faster way.”...

Thanks to efforts by linguists working with the Script Encoding Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, the numerals were included in the September 2022 update of Unicode, an international information technology standard that enables the digitization of the world’s written languages. The new release, Unicode 15.0, provides a virtual identifier for each Kaktovik numeral so developers can incorporate them into digital displays. “It really is revolutionary for us,” Judkins says. “Right now we either have to use photos of the numerals or write them by hand.”

As of Unicode 15.0, you can even use these symbols in your digital communications, as cited in the same article above:

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: “Unicode Request for Kaktovik Numerals,” by Eduardo Marín Silva and Catherine Strand. Submitted to Unicode Technical Committee Document Registry March 16, 2021 (reference)

The Dimensional Hierarchy is a Lie

The cube is a lie.

The square is a lie.

Even the line, is a lie.

Imagine two lines:

━  ━  ━

━  ━  ━

Or this way:

│ │

│ │

│ │

What is their relationship? Which is length? Which is width?

│

│

│━  ━  ━

If I rotated them, how would you know the difference? (Ignoring that these are different ascii characters...)

We think of dimensionality as a hierarchy; a one-dimensional line, two-dimensional square, three-dimensional cube, four-dimensional hypercube or time... but really, these are all single dimensions which may or may not have their own properties (is time just a rotation of space, or something fundamentally different?), which may very well be heterarchical, but we've chosen to think of them hierarchically.

And there is value in doing so, both because there is still clearly some kind of underlying systemic relationship, but also, having a shared understanding of what is up or down, left or right, lateral, before or after, or causal, is just a very useful assumption to make, and makes our perceptions of reality more communicable. Yet, when we fail to recognize that we are not always sharing this understanding, that our different perceptions may reflect the relativistic nature of reality itself, it only holds us back.

A zero-dimensional space is simply a dot. A line is a series of dots that can more parsimoniously be described by the equation Y=A+BX (or you may have learned it as Y=MX+B but it amounts to the same thing...). From the two-dimensional graph space, we can explain a series of dots in terms of their distance from a line cutting through them; the slope, B, being our one dimension.

If we add a second dimension to explain a three-dimensional graph by the distance of dots from a plane (or square) cutting through the space Y=A+B1X1+B2X2, we get something like: 

To the extent that we can conceptualize information, data, as a series of zero-dimensional objects, and create lines and planes and hyperplanes, cutting through a graphical space necessarily at least one dimension larger than the shape we cut through it (this is related to degrees of freedom or rank in statistics), and use that to often quite effectively explain patterns and even create learning algorithms, is it hard to imagine that this might speak to the nature of physical and metaphysical reality as well? We have plenty of other reasons already to believe that reality is better explained via probabilities than causalities, admittedly outside of my wheelhouse. 

Maybe all of these data are just being funneled through the fixed structure we think of as spacetime. But I dunno, maybe it makes more sense to think of reality as an "emergent" property of interactions of data- not that it can't be represented or interfaced with, but that, necessarily, part of the network exists in a larger (NOT "higher", necessarily) dimensional space than we can perceive all at once.

But it may not be that we can't perceive those other dimensions. Again, thinking of them as "higher" may be erroneous. It may just be that we can't perceive all of them at once; we may only be able to perceive, at most, n-1 of them at any one time.

But also, remember, these dimensions may themselves be unfixed, whether it's a matter of rotation, translation, reflection, or maybe even entire re-configuration.

They say that to effectively break the rules, you have to understand them first. I believe there is a numinousness that comes from the ability to think in terms of graphical representations, equations, and probabilities. Maybe it's all something between panentheism and animism? A series of wills superimposed on top of each other, a systemic or functional relationship between all things, each operating within their own dimensionalities; different frequency networks or phase networks, a push and pull of "spiritual forces", no one seeing all of reality, any one only seeing at most n-1 of it; none of it existing in isolation, every one making up its ever-changing totality.

Maximum Recursion Depth... in 3D!!! (Proof of Concept)

While I did not design the algorithm, I've been playing around with the StereoscoPy open source codebase to create anaglyph 3D images. I've talked about my interest in anaglyph 3D before with my Positive and Negative Planes Concept so it was fun to do this. I actually bought red and cyan glasses to try this out (you can find them pretty cheap online).

The results are by no means perfect, but short of designing it from scratch with anaglyph 3D in mind, the fact that it works at all and I can more or less automate it is pretty cool.

How does Anaglyph 3D Work?

Anaglyph 3D takes two images offset from each other, like imagine a photo of a scene, and a subsequent photo taken from a foot to the left, or something like that. It then aligns and merges the images, and color codes them, most frequently with red and cyan. Then, when wearing red and cyan lenses, the respective colors are filtered from one eye or the other, such that your eyes receive competing information that makes it appear 3D.

Tbf since I did not code the algorithm myself, this is a bit of a weak sauce explanation, this is among the reasons why I prefer to do things from scratch like with my Genetic Algorithm that Learns the Konami Code, but for now this is fine.

Anyway, after installing that StereoscoPy module, and after experimenting with several different parameters, I used the following command to generate an anaglyph 3D version of the MRD Cover:

  StereoscoPy -A -S 20 0 -a ./MRD_Cover.jpg ./MRD_Cover.jpg
    ./MRD_Anaglyph.jpg

Rather than using two images, I just used the one cover, but offset it to the left (-S 10), and used their auto-alignment algorithm (-A).

In addition to installing this module with the auto-align optional dependencies, I did also have to install some linux packages for this to work, and only was able to figure that out by tracing some errors and googling around, so it's not as user-friendly as it could be. Perhaps I could submit a PR to make it more user friendly, in lieu of writing it from scratch...

Maximum Recursion Depth in 3D!!!

Reminder that this requires red and cyan glasses.

Anaglyph 3D conversion

JPG of original cover

Appendix-N for a "Weird & Wonderful" Animist Setting I haven't Written Yet: Pariah by way of Maximum Recursion Depth(?)

I've been slowly conceiving of a "Weird & Wonderful" Animist setting, percolating over the last couple years or so at least. I've probably posted other versions of this idea that I'm forgetting, or at least there are other ideas I've posted about that feed into this. It's probably reductive to solely refer to it as an Animist setting, but I don't know how else to do so that isn't rooted in or going to provoke preconceived notions that I don't mean to provoke, that was the best I could think to do.

In it's current shape it's not connected to the shared setting of Maximum Recursion Depth Vol. 1 and MRDVol. 2 directly, but I see it as spiritually connected. Whereas MRD Vol. 1 uses as a metaphor Buddhism and the satire of Journey to the West, and MRD Vol. 2 uses as a metaphor Judaism and my thoughts on Jewish American Identity, this is more so inspired by Animism and Humanism from paleolithic, neolithic, and indigenous cultures both historically and in modern times (acknowledging modern indigenous cultures are not "living museums"). But just as with MRD Vol. 1 and 2, spinning those metaphors into something distinctly and unambiguously my own. I don't want to hew too closely to any specific belief or culture, because I don't want to misrepresent them (I'm already worried about some of my terminology and explanations here, but hopefully the intent comes through) nor risk appropriating them. They are inspirations in a distilled sense, and if you've read anything I've written before, hopefully this is all clear. Anyway... 

The single-sentence pitch might be: Pariah by way of Maximum Recursion Depth(?)

The Appendix-N ended up being so long, and the setting itself still so nascent, that I'm actually going to post this first, you all can digest it, and then later I'll post about the setting and you can try to interpret it from this lens.

It might be a fun exercise to consider what world you might create for yourself from these disparate inspirations.

Appendix-N

I already feel guilty if I forget someone or chose not to include them, but so it goes :/. Also, if you're reading this in the future, hopefully I've since read some of the things here that I reference but acknowledge I have not read yet. And I bet by the time I actually do anything formally with this setting, there will be many more inspirations.

PARIAH (Alone in the Labyrinth). Brilliant setting and arguably the beginning of some of these ideas, from my interview with Semiurge (Archons March On) and subsequent interview with Sofinho. One day I will get back to doing interviews...

Semiurge: To go back to Pariah's setting, it's hit home a bit of what is conventional wisdom for osr settings that didn't previously land for me. The post-apocalyptic, social order has broken down sort of stuff. But in kind of the opposite direction, pre-civilization rather than post-civilization. Smaller cast, smaller world, no big powerful states to exist in the shadow of. More room for weirdos and weird doings.

As discussed in my interview with Sofinho, I also found the Realms and Entheogens in particular deeply inspiring; this weird psychedelic blurring of reality, and defying the preconceived notions and categorical thinking of most kinds of magics, planes, and elements found in many other settings.

Sapiens by Harari and The Dawn of Everything by Graebor & Wengrow. Despite the fact that the latter frequently responds to the former and people seem to put them in mutually exclusive boxes, or perhaps because of that, I include these two together.

Sapiens provides an impressively comprehensive and coherent look at the history of humanity, with some big picture ideas around superorganisms and the nature of religions and ideologies which strongly resonated with me.

Dawn of Everything provides deep and detail-oriented insights into various indigenous and historical cultures, arguing for how things were and how things could be in ways that, while I have some qualms or open questions, I nonetheless find compelling and aspirational.

Ènziramire of On a Majestic Fly Whisk. A brilliant newer TTRPG blogger and academic thinker exposing me to so much more about Africa's cultures, and his own thoughts and ideas. An OSR Aesthetic of Ruin, Have you Met My Ghoulfriend, and Mantismen come to mind most immediately, but all of his posts are amazing.

Ubuntuism the African humanist philosophy. I still have read very little into it unfortunately, since very little of it is readily available, although Enziramire has pointed me to some of Samkange's other works. If Cartesian Rationalism says "I think therefore I am", Ubuntuism says "I am therefore we are". Given the interconnectedness of all people, any one's existence is confirmation of the existence of all others, and the acknowledgment of our collective being. An elegant synthesis of ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. Amazing. Another book on African philosophy I hope to read that Enziramire turned me onto: The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing. 

I assume many of the ideas in that book would fall into the subsequent category below, or outside of either of these categories, which is of course the problem with trying to discretely categorize things like this. I apologize in advance if my categorical scheme between these paragraphs implies any ignorance on my part, but anyway I am not taking these categories as Truths of the universe.

Animism. This is such a broad category that I don't even know where to begin pointing to, and frankly I have not done nearly enough formal reading. I used to be one of those people who thought of animism along a linear spectrum of "progression", but I realize now how mistaken that idea was. As with Ubuntuism, or the Panentheism I see in Judaism, there is an understanding in Animism of the interconnectedness of things, a kind of graph theory by way of spirituality. Some Animism or indigenous culture-related books I hope to read eventually:

• Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs
• How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova
• Us, Relatives: Scaling and Plural Life in a Forager World (Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity Book 12)

Very much open to other suggestions! I'd also like to read more about Shintoism and the Shinto/Buddhist interaction, indigenous Japanese animism such as the Ainu, and the Jomon era (I am somewhat knowledgeable on some of these things already); Australian, Polynesian, Pacific Island indigenous beliefs (and also the math of their astronomy and naval navigation, if known); Inca, Maya, Olmec, Teotihuacan, Hopewell, and other civilizations of the Americas; Celtic Animism; the list goes on...

Somewhat of a tangent, but I'm also interested in the Animist/Dualist interaction, like the recurring Hero Twins in relation to an otherwise Animist schema in many Native American mythologies, the Ondinonk / soul desires concept of the Wendat which I can find very little about online but read about through Dawn of Everything; some of my thoughts around the Philosophy of Games (see that section further below) intersect with these spiritual and cultural ideas. Likewise, the way DoE describes the historical trade practices in the Americas as being rooted not in market / barter economics as we think of it, but in heroic adventures, art, and spiritual wellness; I believe the interaction between these ways of thinking with various aspects of systems or quantitative thinking is profound and vastly underexplored in modern culture, even among more radical countercultures that I'm aware of. Also interested in the dualism of Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, and Yazidi mythology, but I'm not sure if any of that fits into this so that's entirely a tangent...

Poetry, Manifestos, and Countercultural Literature. A broad category and I'm not sure how to describe it's influence necessarily. Perhaps inspired by my interview with Ms. Screwhead of Was It Likely (and Iconoclastic Flow!). Much of what appeals to me about poetry is its synthesis of structure and aesthetics. Listen to this episode of the Ezra Klein podcast, they explain it better. I've been thinking about numinousness, specifically through a conversation with Semiurge, and I believe that ties into this as well. I've been reading things like James Baldwin and the Beat Poets, and some of the manifestos like The Dada Manifesto, The Manifesto of Futurism, and hopefully soon the The Surrealist Manifesto (I'll also get around to properly rereading The Communist Manifesto some day...). It may not directly influence the setting, but it's influencing how I'm thinking about things generally. All of this talk about numinousness and poetry reminds me that from Semiurge's suggestion, I really need to read Novalis as well.

The Philosophy of Games. I've been thinking about "games" for a while. Inspired by Kondiaronk and the Wendat people (by way of aforementioned Dawn of Everything), the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen (he had a great Ezra Klein interview as well, and he also has a book, Games: Agency as Art which admittedly I have not read yet), Genetic Algorithms, and TTRPGs in the abstract. I also need to read Homo Ludens. In the same way that language and writing have been transformative technologies that meaningfully influence society and individual human consciousness, I believe other transformative technologies have existed, or could exist, and that the pursuit of such is no less worthy than that of any other cultural pursuit, or at the very least is a worthwhile pursuit within the context of creative endeavors, the arts, fiction, gaming, etc.

The Aquarians of Aquarian Dawn. Yes I'm referencing my own setting. I still think there's more to explore with that, and I'm better equipped to do so now than I was a 4+ years ago when I was running that campaign. Mike of Sheep & Sorcery described The Aquarians as like a Fantasy version of the Tau from WH40K. While I'm referencing my own ideas feeding into this, I'm also working on something called The Mycelium Matrix with Huffa, which conceptually feeds into this setting well.

The X-Men Comics, specifically the Krakoan Era, and the Cerebro Podcast by Connor Goldsmith. I've always been a fan of X-Men, but the Krakoan Era has really been exceptional (note that I'm still like at least a year behind and very slowly catching up while simultaneously reading through the Claremont era and other classics...). I love how Krakoa picks up kind of where Grant Morrison's New X-Men left off philosophically, trying to not just fit the X-Men into a metaphor of the status quo, but to elevate them, to explore how the interaction of spiritual, intellectual, scientific, and queer ideas might create something radical and powerful and new, something Weird and Numinous and technomagical, while acknowledging flaws and failings and the ways in which they might be undermined or might undermine themselves. It's one of the most interesting takes on the Superhero Mythology that I've ever seen, and it's amazing how consistent and organized it has been across the entire line of books, many creative teams, over a span of years, which is in itself a testament to the narrative they are telling. There's just nothing else like it afaik; even despite the corporate constraints it tells a more interesting and profound story than most anything else of its kind. It is a profoundly honest attempt to explore a new kind of society. I find it inspiring and aspirational in the same way I find the ideas explored in Dawn of Everything, or those explained below.

Charles Stross' Accelerando and Glasshouse, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of series, and Quipu, or the importance of numinousness, and considering alternative STEM frameworks and the interaction of philosophy and STEM through science fiction or other cultures.

A reductive explanation of Stross and Tchaikovsky, and why I group them together, is that they each explore in a brilliant, imaginative, and at least semi-plausible way, transhumanist worlds, through AI/singularity and animal uplifts, respectively. Return to my quote from Semiurge on Pariah to hopefully at least understand in part the circular relationship between any meaningful exploration of the past and future. I am still reading Glasshouse, and have not read Children of Memory yet.

Semiurge also recently suggested an idea around reconceptualizing our categorical frameworks of knowledge, i.e. the semi-arbitrary distinction between humanities and STEM, suggesting as one possibility the idea of numinousness as a better dimensionality reduction (that's my own paraphrasing of it, using Principle Component Analysis as a metaphor here). Some of this I believe is expressed in his Random Numbers, itself inspired by my Weird Colors. This also gets back to the poetry stuff.

As someone who values STEM / systems-thinking, I also want to explore alternative frameworks of doing so, either from science / speculative fiction as explained above, through poetry and spirituality and in the numinous, or through indigenous or historical cultures. I find ideas like the Inca Quipu's knot-based encoding system and other historical or indigenous maths and sciences absolutely fascinating (including modern indigenous maths [EDITED: Hyperlinking this post from the future (it's lower down in the post...)]), and beneficial to humanity as a whole both in a one-dimensional sense as the net effect of its application, but even more so in the multidimensional profundity that comes in having multiple frameworks from which to think about things, and all the ways one may combine them. Below are a couple books that I admittedly have not yet read but that I hope to read eventually. My exploration of Gematria would also fall under this category.

• Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records (The Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies)
• Mathematics of the Incas: Code of the Quipu (Dover Books on Mathematics)

Norbert Wiener

While he is more so an inspiration for MRD Vol. 2, I continue to think Norbert Wiener is someone more people should be reading. He is the originator of the concept of cybernetics, and also someone who clearly thinks critically and philosophically about the world, with generally leftist/progressive views which he was very frank about, and an excellent example of the numinousness found in the intersection of STEM and philosophy. The Human Use of Human Beings, and God & Golem, Inc. are both fairly short reads and geared towards a general audience, and I would recommend both of them (the former especially).

Finally, many of these ideas have been coalescing through my ongoing conversations with my friend Dr. Flux.

I Wrote a Genetic Algorithm to Learn the Konami Code!

It's been a pet interest of mine for years to learn how to write Genetic Algorithms, but it was never quite clicking for me. I ended up stumbling upon this video (embedded below but if you don't see it it's also the previous hyperlink), and it finally clicked. This video is entirely no-code, just a simple and intuitive explanation. They said there'd be a code walkthrough video as well but unfortunately it doesn't look like they ever posted it.

My Genetic Algorithm to Learn the Konami Code is open source, available on github here. With a little work this could probably be fitted to an emulator to actually trigger in a game, or maybe even with a real game console if the controller inputs are programmable, that's a little outside my purview. It would be cool if somebody wanted to try that, but really this is just intended as a technical demonstration.

Genetic Algorithms use the principles of genetics; fitness, reproduction, and mutation, to converge on solutions given some task.

They have a lot of applications, such as robotics, neurocomputation, and machine learning, but this is just a simple Genetic Algorithm, no ML involved here.

I also have some ideas for using Genetic Algorithms for worldbuilding, TTRPG stuff, or quasi-videogames, but still need to give all of those some thoughts.

Keeping it simple, I thought it would be fun to train a Genetic Algorithm to learn the Konami Code.

I give a simple explanation of it here, but if you follow the link above to the github repo, the README explains it in more detail and also shows an example.

Konami Code

["↑", "↑", "↓", "↓", "←", "→", "←", "→", "B", "A", "START"]

The Konami Code is a common set of user inputs in videogames to activate cheats or secrets, most famously old Konami games.

We can think of these 11 inputs as the genes making up a strand of DNA.

Players

We have some number of players. We can represent each player as a strand of DNA composed of 11 genes of seven types: ↑, ↓, ←, →, B, A, or START.

Our initial population has entirely random genes; any 11 inputs among those seven values.

Fitness

We can imagine each player presses their controller inputs one by one (i.e. their genes), and each time their current input matches the Konami Code, their score goes up by one. If they press the wrong button, they lose a life, and they only have one life, so whatever score they had before the mistake is their final score. 

There are certainly more efficient fitness algorithms, but I like the simplicity of this one and the way it works for our metaphor, as if literally pressing the buttons one-by-one on a controller.

Selection and Crossover

We take the players with the top X score and drop the rest of them. 

Then, we generate new players, up to the number of the original playerbase size, by crossing the winners of the previous round. We take any two winners at random, and for each of our 11 genes of the DNA strand, we pick randomly from one parent or the other.

Since all of the new players were created from the selection of the highest scoring players of the previous generation, the genes they inherent are more likely to be correct, so they generally show improved performance over previous generations.

If all of the highest scoring players had a score of two or higher, this means they all inputted ↑ ↑ of the Konami Code correctly, and as a result all of the new players will also get at least a score of two, because they can only inherent ↑ for those first two genes.

On the other hand, if none of the starting players had START as their last gene, then no future generation of players will ever be able to win, because they can never inherent START in the final gene.

This is why we add Mutation.

Mutation

Mutation creates a percent likelihood that any given gene will change into any of our possible inputs, even if they did not inherit that input. With a mutation rate of 0.05, there is a 5% chance that any of the 11 genes of a player's DNA will mutate into any of the seven inputs.

Mutation can cause a good gene i.e. a correct input of the Konami Code to change, meaning it might take more generations of play before a sufficient number of players win. However, it also means that if you start with a low-scoring or non-viable starting group of players, that they can catch up more quickly, or succeed where it might otherwise have been impossible.

AND THAT'S IT!

If you want to know more about the particulars, check out the open source github project, or feel free to ask more questions here.

Sure this is cool I guess, but what's the big deal?

If you think coding and technology is black magic, nothing I say is likely to change that and while I think that's a shame, I'm not trying to change your mind.

All the same, if you're at all interested in natural philosophy or understanding the world, this is a cool demonstration. The fact that we can abstract the principles of genetics and use them to solve problems analogically demonstrates the existence of these systems and how they operate, and by extension informs our understanding of the world. The mathematical or algorithmic representation of them is just a language to make it easier to understand.

To me, conceiving of and training an algorithm to solve the Konami Code, it's like a puzzle, or a poem. It's a little piece of art. That's not to deny that these things can be used poorly, but both things can be true, and these systems exist in the world whether we use them or not, and also, people are using them, so isn't it better to find ways to find the beauty in them and use them for good? Even if you believe there is no good way to use them, if you really believe they're so powerful and so dangerous, isn't that all the more reason to understand what they are and how they work, so that you can better protect yourself from them?

A Super-Solid State of Matter

A super-solid state of matter like the opposite of plasma, colder than cold. Like a miniature blackhole in homeostasis. Black, opaque, bending spacetime around it. Hard, like absolute sharpness. Heavy with its own gravity, yet inert in-place. When pulled from homeostasis by a sufficient force, the imperfections in its field shear at spacetime like a ball of scribbles puncturing paper.

Found this old writeup in my notes, pretty sure I never posted it before.