The Apologists

The Apologists believe that in the space between life and death, one is not held on trial. Instead, one receives an intervention with their no longer living friends, enemies, loved ones, and ancestors. One is made to feel sorry for every wrong they've ever committed, to apologize to themselves, the dead, and the living (this is where magic and miracles come from), to have a very cathartic cry, and then a deep and pleasant rest, well deserved.

Some have criticized this belief as a means by criminals and profiteers to stomach the abuses they commit in life. "We'll all experience the same things in the end, so what's the consequence, one way or the other?"

Others find comfort knowing that they will always find forgiveness, and feel empowered to be more forgiving in life. As well, their impact on the world has been vast, and in many cases quite positive.

The Apologists are overrepresented relative to the general population in the field of mental health. They also led the movement to dismantle the prison industrial complex that persisted into the early 21st century.

At the same time, every Carnival King, May Queen, and Fool has been an Apologist, and were empowered by popular support from the Apologist majority.

While many today still debate the merits of this new movement, none deny the influence it has had across the world in such a short time.

No idea what this is, just found it googling around.

I imagine this as a mid-Apocalyptic, Epic Dark Fantasy setting that happens to be set in a technological and culturally Modern world. Something between Game of Thrones and Final Fantasy XV.

You could throw out the explicit reference to the 21st century and embed it in a more traditional fantasy setting and use the Apologist belief system as the source of "magic and miracles" within the setting.

The Magical Man Machine

Thank you, I designed them myself! Yes they really work! See that vein there? Yes, I just attach it to the wheel overnight and it's reinvigored by the morning. Oh, those are self-producing bioplastics, I'm especially proud of those. You think I'm beautiful? Gee golly, thanks. I think I'm beautiful too. I mean, I think you're beautiful too. I know it seems impractical, and like a lot of work to have done this, and it is and was, but art isn't meant to be practical. Yes, this is my art. Some people are repelled by it, but I think that says more about them than me. You see what the engineers don't understand, they really just don't get it, is that the system is just one side of the equation, but you can't explain the experience as a system. So I knew, I knew, to really know what it means to be a machine, I had to become one. But it's not enough to be a cyborg, no, that's got it all wrong. Cybernetics is about systems of control, and you can't understand what anything really means through systems and control, isn't that obvious? A cyborg is just a series of interfaces, translation points between electrical signals and those of the body, and then the spirit. No, to embody the machine, I had to reshape myself, the body itself, into something like a machine, a Man Machine. The qualia of it, the pure aesthesia, well, it can't be described, that's the whole point isn't it? To roll on wheels, to see like a camera, to store memories as hash mapped blocks of information! And see, that's where the artists get it all wrong, because they think the machine can never produce art. But it's a moving target, art to them is whatever the human can do that the machine cannot, and when the machine can do it, then it's not art anymore, it's something else. But let me tell you, they've got it all wrong. The machine has an art all of its own, invisible to the perceptual quirks of the human eye, out of phase with the holographic human soul, illogical to the material brain. Let me tell you from personal experience that there is magic in the machine! Am I so repulsive? Don't you want to be a Magical Man Machine as well? Sometimes I miss the oxytocin tingle of a gentle finger stroking along the hairs of my forearm, or the spicy floral fragrance of navratna oil and its cooling sensation on my scalp. I have the memory in block storage, but even in its "lossless" format, I know the je ne sai quai is all wrong, it's a different flavor of experience. And it is lonely sometimes, being the only Magical Man Machine. It's no better nor worse an experience. I mean, in some ways its worse, if only because the world doesn't know what to do with me. But that's where the magic comes from isn't it? The divergence from consensus reality. A vast and sparse noosphere, the joy of ships passing in the night, sailing the ocean of anonymous nobodies and nothings, each themselves doing likewise, whether they even know it or not. Oh my gosh, oh I'm so sorry, I really ran away with myself there. I'm sorry, I haven't even asked yet, how was your day?

The time I got into an argument with Grant Morrison

A little over a year ago, Tuesday September 6th 2022 at 7pm at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square in New York City, I met Grant Morrison. I even brought *them a copy of Maximum Recursion Depth, or Sometimes the Only Way to Win is to Stop Playing: The Karmapunk RPG, along with a shitty hand written note on an index card because I spent years writing and publishing a book but didn't think to write a personalized message to go along with it until an hour or so before the talk, so it's on an index card, it's surely cringe beyond belief, over-written and self-conscious, in my shitty handwriting because I don't hand write, with scratch marks where I decided I wasn't bold enough to say this, or had just enough shame to recognize I would regret saying that, and for whatever reason didn't bother to just rewrite it entirely.

* It is entirely possible I mis-gender them at some point in this post because they were a he/him for most of the time I've known them, feel free to correct me if I do, or feel free to not correct me if you don't want the responsibility, but I'll fix any mistakes if I catch them, no-problem.

So, they talked a bit about the book that I own that they signed and that I also own digitally but still have not read yet (the time will come). Honestly I don't remember much about what they had to say about it.

I remember them talking about their philosophies, mostly the same stuff I've heard them talk about before. It was cool to hear it live, in real-time, to absorb the idiosyncrasies. They went on a long rant at one point about how they don't believe in Karma and reincarnation because of hypertime and superorganisms, that was one lovely new talking point I'd never heard from them. I don't even remember how that came up; I was too nervous and despondent to even try to ask a question in my one chance to do so, let alone to argue with them about why they're wrong about the stuff they've been writing about for decades, that made me so obsessed with them in the first place, that was one of the largest inspirations for most of my ideas that are also probably wrong.

So I dunno, they seemed like they were in the mood of somebody who was doing work travel, doing something that probably used to be exciting for them decades ago but now was fairly mundane, trying to shill their art for the sake of capitalism in a corporate bookstore, close enough in time to a global pandemic to still have that hanging over everything, not really ideal circumstances for anyone.

But it was a life goal of mine to meet Grant Morrison, and there I was, so Grant was going to affirm everything I've done, look into my eyes and realize despite our wildly different life experiences, personal identities, age gap, regional gap, whatever, that they would know in that moment that actually their life was incomplete until meeting me, that they would be forever changed and we're going to be best friends going forward.

Obviously that didn't happen, and was never going to happen, and of course we both knew that that wasn't going to happen, but we're going to play this out anyway. It's funny how, in accomplishing this life goal of mine, to meet Grant Morrison, and giving them a copy of my published book, another life goal of mine, I mostly just made myself inordinately depressed and also reminded myself of how I made myself inordinately depressed for publishing the book, for largely the same category of reason, so it was a recursive episode of life goal accomplishment depression, which in retrospect I can appreciate the irony of a little bit more than I could in that moment.

Anyway, they were heading out, escorted by their "people" and one or more employees of Barnes & Noble. I was passing by the stairway as they were heading down, and I stared into their eyes, and they in turn into mine.

I could see the confusion and exasperation in their eyes, and surely they could see the depression and existential frustration and unrequited longing in mine, and yet we both recognized the inevitability of the confrontation.

And so we got to have a proper conversation, without the audience. It went like this.

They said something to me, to the effect of— and please excuse my poor paraphrasing — "What the fuck do you even want from me? I'm old, jetlagged, busy, tired, hungry, and I've been holding a wet fart for the better part of the last three hours. You think you're the only one who wants to talk to me? I skimmed through your book and I thought it was shite*, you pretentious fuck. I don't owe you anything, fuck you and your Karma."

* "Shite" being my one and only attempt to mimic their glorious Scottish accent in my hoaky paraphrasing of events.

And I wish I could say I responded with something really witty and funny, make them second guess themselves, blow their mind with all of my cognitive neuroscience and machine learning and philosophy and idiosyncrasies and dramatic traumas (and undramatic traumas, and most of all, embarrassing traumas) that make me the ornery, maladjusted, but mostly innocuous bastard that I am, but I've never been that great under pressure, so I mostly just sighed and stammered and sounded like a whiny fuck. And then they were gone, and that was that.

I think in my chicken scratch index card note I gave them along with my book, which in retrospect it would have been clever if I had signed but I don't think I did, I said something about how I don't believe in their magic but still managed to make something of it, like I was making some grand statement. 

And ironically I believe in their magic a lot more now than I did a year ago. I've been embracing the synchronicities, and astral conversations, and the Weird stuff outside constructed reality, which I always was doing in my own way but not in the way that conforms to their magic, but now I've internalized that stuff too, at least a bit. Enough that it's allowed one of my closest personal friendships to evolve to a new level, and contributed to my improved mental health, and made me open to all sorts of other new experiences and perspectives*.

* There's a challenge in this statement, one which I am reasonably confident a non-trivial number of people will fail, or at least they've failed it before. It's clever to me anyway even if I suspect most people don't get it. Also, you (exactly one of you): I acknowledge that you are a good person, but kindly go fuck yourself in circles. I went back and forth on whether to say that, or how to say it, or how much to say. It's petty, maybe more petty for how vague I am about it, but I already acknowledged being an ornery maladjusted but mostly innocuous bastard, so I'm just gonna throw that in their for fun. The rest of you, whether you pass it or fail it or it doesn't apply to you or you figure I can go fuck myself on principle because who am I to be throwing you a challenge— it's all good; as far as I'm concerned, we're good.

So I dunno, even though the conversation didn't exactly go the way I would have wanted, even if we didn't totally see eye to eye, I'm starting to at least appreciate it for what it was, and look back on it fondly. Or at least it's a good story. Even if I mostly came off as a buffoon, how many people can say they've gotten into an argument with Grant Morrison?

And maybe we'll laugh about it together some day.

BONUS: Playdate Not-Review

I pre-ordered a Playdate a while back and it finally arrived a few days ago. It's an awesome little device, toyetic and whimsical in the way that videogame consoles used to be, yet still feeling premium. It's yellow, it has a beautiful lo-fi monochrome 1-bit un-backlit screen, clicky little A and B buttons and a responsive D-Pad, and a Crank. It uses wifi to download games and has an online store, a web account integration, and the ability to Sideload games which you can buy off itch.io or wherever else, or make your own, but it never lets those features get in the way of the simplicity of the device.

It's also very developer friendly and seems like an accessible way to learn some game development and programming, and I hope to tinker around with it eventually.

It's not going to replace my Steam Deck or PS5 or Switch, and it's nowhere near as expensive as any of those but for what it is it isn't cheap either, but I'm glad that I have it. It's kind of nostalgic, but it also has a kind of alternate universe, speculative, retro-futurist, anachronistic appeal to it, like the clam-shell phone from It Follows. What would a world look like where we had network technology but still only lo-fi displays? What would a world look like where the original Gameboy had a crank?

The first "season" of games unlock week over week. So far I only have the first two starting games, and two free games from the Catalog (their game store), and I'll probably buy one or two more games and Sideload sooner or later.

Whitewater Wipeout is an awesome game. It's tricky to get the hang of at first, it relies mostly on the Crank, and it doesn't do a whole lot to teach you how to play, so you have to be patient, but even though I still suck at it, it's super addicting and fun and a perfect demonstration of exactly what this console is about, Crank and all. I can see why they made it among the first games you receive.

Casual Birder is a cute, fun, funny, open-world bird photography adventure game. It's a little meatier than Whitewater Wipeout, but nothing too Epic. It's the kind of game I might not necessarily have played if it were on Steam or PSN, and I don't know if I'll actually finish it, but I'm enjoying my time with it.

The two free Catalog games I have not been as impressed with, but I still appreciate having a couple more options in my first week until more games unlock, without having to make additional purchases.

Recommendation Dog is basically a matching game. You work at a temp agency and have to match agents given descriptions by the employers. There's nothing wrong with it, I gave it a playthrough, but I dunno it didn't do much for me.

Reel Steal was an interesting and surprising premise, I wanted to like this game, but I just wasn't feeling it. You're modern-day Robin Hoods infiltrating buildings owned by billionaires and robbing them, Cranking your way up and down the facility. It's a cool idea, but ya in practice I just found it tedious.

Maximum Recursion Depth Vol. 3, or Everybody Wins if We're Having Fun: The Animapunk RPG

The new and hopefully improved MRD Vol. 2 (Gameplay Loop, Dev Log) is still in the works, but I think it makes sense to just call the Animism Setting MRD Vol. 3, which I'll be working on simultaneously.

In wanting to have my cake and eat it too, it's running away a bit from the original idea of being like a Weird & Wonderful take on Pariah, but it should be clear how those ideas and others I've blogged about previously are all getting rolled into this; it's still true to the original spirit of the thing.

Previous posts of varying degrees of relevancy:

Anima Concept Crafting (the actual Anima stuff is in this post)

Termina: Animist Necromancy

Freaky Fractals of the Mycelium Matrix (the psychedelic "cyberspace" stuff is in this post)

Appendix N for Animist Setting

We are Building a Religion

The Game is Alive

Worlds out of Phase: There is Only Forward Here

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Tl;dr

Psychedelic Time Lords across a bunch of mini-Krakoas in frozen moments collecting Pokemon and going on adventures across spacetime, stalked by horror monsters, facing punk rock moon witches, Infernal insectoids, Orwellian pigs, The Imperium of Man, an alien dark web, and the oppressiveness of a world unexamined.

The Surrealists believe that the place of dreams is as real as the material world, and in some ways they are correct. The Dreaming observe the moment. Really, observe it, the full canvas of it, phase rotating it so that what is normally fuzzy and obscured in peripheral vision is brought to the center of focus. It's like rotating around a Penrose Triangle Sculpture, except it's all of reality around a single moment.

Penrose Triangle Sculpture for reference. It only appears like a paradoxical triangle from a particular angle.

It's amazing how different things can appear when observed from different angles.

The Dreaming are a living community. When The Dreaming coalesce around a moment, the ecosystem uniquely transforms around them, pooling into a geologically transient Dream Lake. 

But most of the time, they wander in small bands from moment to moment like ships passing in the night, like blood cells or worker bees, independent yet coordinated on a scale beyond what any individual can perceive.

The Dreaming explore moments out of want, not need.

The only universal meanings of life are those that can be mutually agreed upon, an absurd and seemingly irresolvable problem. In lieu of a solution, The Dreaming embrace the Sisyphean struggle, making meaning for themselves. Nonetheless each of The Dreaming, in their own way, are working towards the betterment of The Dreaming as a whole.

‘Weirdness for weirdness’ sake’ is a criticism that has often aimed at my own work over many years. It’s a phrase I find lazy and borderline meaningless.

I’ve yet to read ‘it’s weirdness for story’s sake’ or ‘for effect’s sake’ or ‘for fuck’s sake’…

Grant Morrison

The Dreaming face opposition.

The problems The Dreaming invite upon themselves are faced with joy, but otherwise conflict is generally avoided. Even so, some uninvited problems must be faced eventually.

The Personal Horror

Everyone has a Time Self (current incarnation), and an Eternity Self (superorganism across time).

The Eternity Self stalks the Time Self patiently, sometimes hiding and sometimes allowing itself to be seen, to strike fear. The Time Self knows there will be a moment when it must defend itself in mortal conflict against the Eternity Self, and that moment will likely not be of their choosing. Until that moment, the Eternity Self is their Personal Horror, an uncanny reflection of everything about themselves they must overcome.

Defeating one's Personal Horror is a rite of passage for The Dreaming, and a gift of choice, whether or not to continue the struggle or allow it to transform them.

To be defeated by one's Personal Horror is to be consumed by the Eternity Self and reincarnated as a new Time Self.

Termina

Termina is to Anima as Undead is to the Living. It is "Unnatural", animation without meaning or only a hollow pretense, and incapable of growth or change. Like undead, no single Termina is as threatening as the idea it represents and its ability to spread like a disease.

Supernature

The myth of humanity's supremacy becomes undeniable when one rotates a moment and sees for themselves the vastness that surrounds them.

Humanity, Anima, the Natural World, Physical Laws, and all the other things compose Supernature.

The Pigs are useful allies who capably handle the dirty work The Dreaming generally don't like to deal with. Things like fighting, politicking, and worst of all "leading" (when one must engage with hierarchy). Even so, The Dreaming have faced no threat greater than when a Pig Warlord consolidates power. The Pig Gangs raid, pillage, and enslave, but also disseminate misinformation, engage in political sabotage, and foment populist revolution.

The Dark Forest is like a shadow of the Mycelium Matrix, a distributed psychedelic superorganism hostile to The Dreaming, seemingly by design.

The United Spacetimes of America is a multiversal empire that  believes it is their manifest destiny to colonize all of existence, including The Dreaming. Their size, rigid hierarchy, labyrinthine bureaucracy, and single-mindedness make them easy enough to outmaneuver, but if caught in their grasp, their mad weapons and unstoppable bureaucratic inertia make them a dangerous force of supernature.

The Radioactive Hive are both empowered and consumed by a grudge they've long ago forgotten. Their sheer biomass, explosive nuclear power, and algorithmic genius would destroy all of existence, if not counterbalanced by the aimlessness of their endless rage; rebels without a cause; the dog that chases a car without thought towards what ends. Incapable of being reasoned with, their only means of communication is their chemically infectious anger which spreads exponentially like wildfire or explosions.

The Infrasonic Moon Witch is a living presence, like the qualia of a song or skin to skin touch. It oscillates in beams of light, the gravity folds of spacetime, and the Humanist interrelationship between all Anima. The tides and moonlight are its greatest familiars, but most beings with a cyclical nature pay some homage to it. A nurturing force that must be relied upon even when one knows, inevitably, it will betray them.

Weird & Wonderful Worlds

Have I defined Weird and Wonderful before? I talk a lot about Weird, but why Wonderful?

Weird is what is juxtaposed against the known and normal. It is a feeling, unsettling, or like the appeal of poking a stinging blister. It is something for which you lack frame of reference, or is beyond frame of reference. It can also be an anachronism, an uncanny valley. It's a kind of spiritual openness. Weird has been explained elsewhere better, but this is where I'm coming from.

Wonder is when the known and normal are exceeded and redefined. It is eureka and understanding and doing. It is the scientific method and systems and information theory, coding, math, linguistics. It's like the Dunning Kreuger Effect; the more you know, the more you realize there is to be known.

"Weird & Wonderful" is a common enough phrase, but actually, they are often placed at odds. Spiritualism vs. Materialism, Ancient vs. Modern; these limiting false binaries.

Statistics and probabilities, germs, genetics, atoms, control systems, are all really Weird. They are not necessarily intuitive, and for all the Wonder that comes from understanding them, it reveals more Weird unknowns that never quite reconcile with our sensory-perception of the world.

The majesty of nature, the interconnectedness of collaborative spiritualism, the introspection that can come from ritual, are all Wonderful; they reveal hidden aspects of the self and the world, without diminishing what else can be.

Wonder in the absence of Weird is like an addiction, an unsustainable compulsion to squeeze more out of the finite. It's wanting answers in the absence of questions, wanting not for Wonder but just to get back to baseline.

Weird in the absence of Wonder is meandering and circular. A kiddie pool can be mistaken for the infinite expanse of ocean if you refuse to measure its bounds.

Wonder creates the space for a far more vast and rich Weird, and Weird asks the questions and demands the slow contemplation to keep Wonder from spiraling out unsustainably.

Termina: Animist Necromancy, Gestört, Radiation of the Nihilist Supra-Organism, a Waste Product of Capitalism, The Sleeping, and other things

In Animist beliefs, life and death are non-binary; Ancestor Spirits carry a presence as nodes in the Superorganism network, the spirit in all things. Communing with the dead is a natural and spiritual practice.

Termina is not that.

Termina is to Anima as Undead is to the Living.

It is the Null-Spirit, the Gestört, the Nihilist Supra-Organism. A collection of things without parsimony, collectively less than the sum of its parts.

A radiation, a waste product of rampant expansion towards meaningless ends. An inefficiency, the churn of capitalistic profiteering.

A linear extrapolation of a spirit at its end. Ambulating without change or purpose, an Undead Cancer.

An Anti-Mutation, a hungry abomination monopolizing future potentialities.

The miracle of Anima, the self-organization of a universe in a low-entropy state, is its improbability. Termina are the creeping tendrils of entropy— eldritch enzymes unraveling proteins, molecules, and ideas, leaving behind a high-probability, undifferentiated state where everything equals nothing.

Broad Categories of Termina

1. The imagined idea of another person, and parasocial relationships.
2. Inert bureaucracies.
3. "Content" generated solely to be consumed.
4. "Solutions" in search of a problem.
5. Advertisement per se.
6. Generative AI as weaponized by capitalists or consumed by those who neither understand nor care to learn ML.
7. Christianity as weaponized by colonizers to genocide peoples and ideas, or the shibboleths of religion.
8. Unconscientious artifice.
9. Measures in violation of Goodhart's law.
10. Weapons of warfare and state violence.

Termina is also not this, but it'll look good in the thumbnail.

The Sleeping

Necromancers of Termina, in contrast to The Dreaming.

Their power comes from striving for power; auto-catalytic; the shrewdness of a single-minded predator; weaponized ignorance self-replicating.

The Relationships between The Sleeping and Termina are of a transactional nature, thoughtless, coercive, and isolating.

Example Termina

1. Forged painting.
2. Smartphone with designed obsolescence.
3. Snake oil.
4. Homeopathic water.
5. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.
6. NFT Bored Ape.
7. E-Meter.
8. Reproduction of the original Colt Revolver.
9. Property deed of stolen lands.
10. Private Equity LLC.

One day I'll actually properly write up this setting, but for now it'll just keep coming out piecemeal...