Today's bit of fortune-telling is courtesy of "The Silicon Valley Tarot", an online reading of which is available at the Steve Jackson Games website. The thus-far-unnamed Hedge-hunter may well find himself on a character sheet sometime soon...
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Instead of an oddment, today I have found a Hollow, a portion of the Hedge that someone... or several someones... claims as their own. Ranging in size from a small campsite to a sprawling estate, these areas are rarely unoccupied, and certainly wasn't in this case. The motley of Changelings had set up a camp drawing on the images of a traveling circus of mdoest size. After talking my way past their embarrassed lookouts (easing their discomfort with a few extra goblin fruit I keep for such occasions), their leader insisted that I accept the wisdom of their "seer". Imagine my surprise when, after ducking into a six-sided pavilion tent, I found myself facing a pasty-faced Wizened in a lab coat, manipulating what could only be an actual Babbage Engine.
The somewhat androgynous person turned from the machine to face me, adjusting the lenses on his (her?) goggles. "Come to consult the machine?" she (he?) inquired. The voice gave no clue as to gender; I set the issue aside as irrelevant.
"Your colleagues in the rest of the motley insisted that I speak with you," I said.
The "seer" nodded and gestured at a worn Aeron chair. As I settled myself, the seer opened a large, portable bookcase and extracted a bundle of worn, blue-tinted punch-cards tied with what looked like magnetic tape. The seer untied the cards and presented them to me in the usual manner for Tarot cards. "Meditate on your question. Shuffle the cards, choose three, and hand those to me," were my instructions.
Having made my indecipherable choices, the seer ran them through the Engine and informed me of the results.
"First is the Firewall. Protection, fortification, civility, courtesy, protocol. You're well fortified against the barbarian hordes." It took me a moment's thought to realize that this seer drew upon the symbols of mortal technology. It made a certain amount of sense, given the technological bent to most of the decorations, and definitely piqued my interest for the rest of the reading.
"Next is the Flame War. Two pedants, locked in mortal combat, scorch each other with fiery words. Angry, aggrieved, they wield their righteous furies in rhetorical joust. Insult, invective, profanity - they will stop at nothing until one or the other is humiliated or banished. Quibbling, hair-splitting, dogmatism, nitpicking." I considered whether any of my colleagues or contacts back at my primary Freehold would meet this description and made a few mental notes.
"Last is Encryption, inverted. Beware of subterfuge, ignorance. Things are going on behind your back. Can you afford not to know?" I sighed. My forays into the Hedge and research into oddments were, by and large, meant to keep me out of the idiotic games that the Courts played endlessly. While this particular symbol was hardly unusual for anyone who was involved at all in any Freehold, the fact that it was brought to my attention did not cheer me.
The seer approached a chalkboard and began to scrawl with a singularly noisy piece of yellow chalk. "Jet-set betrayals," the seer said, after a moment's calculations. "Is that a Chateau Margaux you're pouring there, or is it your life's blood? The plusher it gets, the deeper the grave. You may be saved, but you'll have to wash dishes."
I carefully recorded the seer's words in a notebook, then gave my thanks. The rest of the motley thanked me for my visit, offering a few words of advice about the most recent goings-on in the Hedge and the location of a nearby portal back to the mortal world. Perhaps it was time to return to the Freehold for an extended period?
Showing posts with label oddment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oddment. Show all posts
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Memories, moods, habits, and a multi-billion-dollar industry
This oddment seems more similar to lichen than more familiar vegetation. It is usually found on the parts of parent vegetation closest to the ground and therefore easily ignored. The basic structure resembles vegetation like strawberries or mundane spider-plants: small pockets of slightly more dense material connected to the next by miniscule stalk-like runners. No two examples of this particular oddment are precisely alike in terms of coloration, scent, or other details, but certain types can be grouped by general 'theme'. Unlike invasive lichen encountered in the mortal realm, this oddment family does not actively infest nearby vegetation; rather, their presence (especially different types combining in the same oddment) can radically alter the emotional connotation of any adjacent oddment, and removing them can be a daunting task for even the most experienced oddment-cultivator.
In the most recent issue of Wired [citation to follow when I get around to it], I found an article discussing the corporate interpretation of the phrase "better living through chemistry". In essence, the article focuses on one person's backlash against the "Prozac Nation" mindset, which proclaims any and all non-"up" moods to be anathema to the American Way... and therefore represent a potential market for goods and services. You may glance at your bulk-mail folder and assume that various pharmaceuticals intended for more intimate situations are the end-all and be-all of the companies responsible for such things, but apparently anti-depressants have been at the top of the industry's best-seller lists for the past five years or so. The subject of the article goes on to assert that certain "down" moods are just part of the human condition, and must be treated through the older methods of communication with one's fellows and honest introspection with oneself.
Figure that we still need expert opinions to determine when we're outside of this range, as well as establishing where this general range is for each of us. Figure that the pharmaceutical industry will not be able to provide us with chemical help for all of life's bumps and bruises and little disappointments... as well they should not. Figuring out that stuff on our own, or failing to do so when or as quickly as we may individually desire, is still something that can't be taken away from us. I may well wind up wishing to become an account in a blood bank (free lobotomy as part of the deal), but if I'm going to end up in such a state, I want to go into it all at once and of my own volition, rather than one capacity for emotion at a time.
Even if, for example, my capacity for regret is chemically damped, the rest of my life (of which my body is only a manifestation) will not stop providing the sources for regret, and it will simply show up elsewhere. A crude proof of this is available through basic research into various documented psychological illnesses with physical manifestations; when the body and/or mind are injured but the patient refuses to seek treatment, the symptoms worsen until the patient can no longer ignore them. Consider an individual whose capacity for anger has been chemically damped; the patient is no longer subject to raging physical abuse of his or her loved ones, but neither can they be motivated to change their circumstances by receiving abuse in turn. The anger response is simply not available, to the patient's detriment.
As any artist worthy of the name will tell you, emotions are not lights. While one can be visibly angry or visibly sad, the emotions are not only highly variable in strength, but change with little apparent provocation (at least in the eyes of those who are unfamiliar with the emotions and the person experiencing them). It will be a long time, if ever, before a mere pill can truly save us from ourselves on that level.
In the most recent issue of Wired [citation to follow when I get around to it], I found an article discussing the corporate interpretation of the phrase "better living through chemistry". In essence, the article focuses on one person's backlash against the "Prozac Nation" mindset, which proclaims any and all non-"up" moods to be anathema to the American Way... and therefore represent a potential market for goods and services. You may glance at your bulk-mail folder and assume that various pharmaceuticals intended for more intimate situations are the end-all and be-all of the companies responsible for such things, but apparently anti-depressants have been at the top of the industry's best-seller lists for the past five years or so. The subject of the article goes on to assert that certain "down" moods are just part of the human condition, and must be treated through the older methods of communication with one's fellows and honest introspection with oneself.
Figure that we still need expert opinions to determine when we're outside of this range, as well as establishing where this general range is for each of us. Figure that the pharmaceutical industry will not be able to provide us with chemical help for all of life's bumps and bruises and little disappointments... as well they should not. Figuring out that stuff on our own, or failing to do so when or as quickly as we may individually desire, is still something that can't be taken away from us. I may well wind up wishing to become an account in a blood bank (free lobotomy as part of the deal), but if I'm going to end up in such a state, I want to go into it all at once and of my own volition, rather than one capacity for emotion at a time.
Even if, for example, my capacity for regret is chemically damped, the rest of my life (of which my body is only a manifestation) will not stop providing the sources for regret, and it will simply show up elsewhere. A crude proof of this is available through basic research into various documented psychological illnesses with physical manifestations; when the body and/or mind are injured but the patient refuses to seek treatment, the symptoms worsen until the patient can no longer ignore them. Consider an individual whose capacity for anger has been chemically damped; the patient is no longer subject to raging physical abuse of his or her loved ones, but neither can they be motivated to change their circumstances by receiving abuse in turn. The anger response is simply not available, to the patient's detriment.
As any artist worthy of the name will tell you, emotions are not lights. While one can be visibly angry or visibly sad, the emotions are not only highly variable in strength, but change with little apparent provocation (at least in the eyes of those who are unfamiliar with the emotions and the person experiencing them). It will be a long time, if ever, before a mere pill can truly save us from ourselves on that level.
Friday, January 18, 2008
disposable consumerism
This oddment comes from a creeping vine that looks almost exactly like thousands of other examples. Different types of vine are usually found in close proximity to others, each with a highly variable pattern of coloration and shape. This variation often deceives the novice oddment collector into thinking that one particular type is significantly different from the others in terms of flavor, effect and so on, but with very little experimentation will unveil the uniformly poor quality of these fruit.
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I'm old enough to remember when compact disks first hit the market, and when the players started at $100.00 a pop. I'm even old enough to remember when Betamax and VHS were neck-in-neck for the preferred format; the current kerfuffle about "BlueRay vs. HD" is just more of the same. Today's oddment stems from the fact that VCRs are now available for the low, low price of $20.00, and universal remotes for them are available for the equally low, low price of one dollar. This means that folk who are surviving on minimum wage today can fill their studio apartments with cheap versions of obsolete technology... which will break down on a regular basis, requiring such consumers to replace their crap on a regular basis. The products in question are deliberately designed so that repairing them is more trouble and expense than it is worth, which forces consumers to buy the next version of the same stuff, which is still basically disposable.
The only drawback is that, unlike the oddments of my imagination, cheap shoddy crap available at bargain discount stores does NOT recycle as easily as it should. And let's face it, when we live in an age when the American burakumin (look it up) pick through curbside recycling for whatever they can carry (in order to sell it for that day's meal and whatever's left over not quite covering their rent and utilities), it becomes obvious that there has to be a better solution...
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I'm old enough to remember when compact disks first hit the market, and when the players started at $100.00 a pop. I'm even old enough to remember when Betamax and VHS were neck-in-neck for the preferred format; the current kerfuffle about "BlueRay vs. HD" is just more of the same. Today's oddment stems from the fact that VCRs are now available for the low, low price of $20.00, and universal remotes for them are available for the equally low, low price of one dollar. This means that folk who are surviving on minimum wage today can fill their studio apartments with cheap versions of obsolete technology... which will break down on a regular basis, requiring such consumers to replace their crap on a regular basis. The products in question are deliberately designed so that repairing them is more trouble and expense than it is worth, which forces consumers to buy the next version of the same stuff, which is still basically disposable.
The only drawback is that, unlike the oddments of my imagination, cheap shoddy crap available at bargain discount stores does NOT recycle as easily as it should. And let's face it, when we live in an age when the American burakumin (look it up) pick through curbside recycling for whatever they can carry (in order to sell it for that day's meal and whatever's left over not quite covering their rent and utilities), it becomes obvious that there has to be a better solution...
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