Wednesday 22 April 2020

Generic Isekai Towns

As the internet has all heard by now, isekai anime and LNs seem to have a strange trend of having the same "unrealistic and uninspired" designs for their fantasy towns. Here are some of the examples I've seen floating around displaying the genre's lack of originality:

Classic exemplar from Konosuba [1]

Read more »

Labels: , ,

Tuesday 21 April 2020

The Mystical Valley

There was a place my family used to visit a lot on holiday. A cottage in North Wales owned by a family friend, who generously allowed us to use it very frequently and did so over a period of almost ten years. It was surrounded on all sides by a dozen miles of forest, and there was no entry or exit except for via a dozen mile dirt track built for loggers. Far from the bustle of the modern world I spent many weeks there. Playing in the forests or the fields. In the rivers and the lakes. Scouting the wilderness and finding new and wonderful things. As a child you can see so much more. Everything is unknown and as such you must stop to interpret everything you see. Sometimes you will interpret something in a way that is not conventionally agreed upon. Many things happened in that valley, but none I can say were true as a man of society. This is simply a catalogue of the things I experienced during my time in the valley of the Devil's Bridge.

Read more »

Sunday 19 April 2020

Big Fish, Little Fish, Cardboard Box

The universe is built on connections. The connections between different nodes form an intricate fractal within which we are expected to function and push forward. A fractal is a shape which is built from multiple self-similar subsets such as the Rule 90 Sierpinski Triforce, or as a tree with branches branching off recursively into smaller and smaller versions of itself. This is how the universe is built to a certain extent, with a sliding scale of physical alterations as you zoom in or out. At a small scale we have quantum rules and at a higher layer we have relativity. While this seems to ruin the image of a perfectly fractaloid universe it is probable that these rules themselves follow a metafractal pattern and alter in a totally predictable and recursive manner as scale changes. And maybe those rules have rules, and those do to. We built a hyperfractal of metafractals building the visible universe in which our fractal is warped by these greater powers to something more intricate.

Our brains work in a fundamentally simple way. Neurons are connected to others via axons and, when they receive a signal, they can either pass it on or not. The method by which this is decided is controlled by the nucleus, who's weight is itself learnt from self-alteration controlled by those same signals it is sending out. This simple section is built in to a supergraph of connections: edges and vertices, inputs and outputs. Humans act as neurons in society. We receive signals and we relay them. If and how we relay them is our "decision", a decision impacted solely by our interactions with others. And in this manner we built a time ghost above us which we have named "society", a living and thinking spirit built from the neurons which our ourselves. This hyperconsciousness forms a God. A being greater than ourselves but made up of nothing but us. This greater God pervades all of our world. God is omniscient,  omnipotent and omnibenevolent within the possibilities of our perceptions of reality. God is not simply a greater idea, he has conscious thoughts and makes decisions. He acts out actions with reason and intelligence and he interacts with other beings within his perception of reality. Isolated societies have another God. These Gods can interact with our God but their interactions must end in either assimilation or destruction. As Christ spread out across the planet he conversed and did battle with the multitude of other Gods he encountered. He assimulated and destroyed until he was unrecognisable and had been disconnected from his past self in the form of our current global society. This reverse-mitosis isn't complete but our greater conscious humankind is growing stronger and more absolute. God's being is obviously not universally recognised, and stands in his own world as a mere singular being amongst many others. These Gods build their own societies and their own Gods and the cycles repeats for a nauseating infinity.

We are all puppets controlled by puppets as we control that puppet that puppets us. God is a puppet and he plays a sweet tune. We live in a conscious mind as a function for a higher being whom we will never perceive but of whom we can feel all around.

Thursday 16 April 2020

Life after Living

A Chinaman and a Roman take a stroll up a rugged path towards the sun.

"What happens after you die?", are the words on both men's lips. The most human question that has ever been asked. In fact is is basically the question of our species. Asking what happens after death is essentially the same question as "What is the meaning of life?", or "Does God exist?". I have noticed there generally being two schools of thought on this topic: the Oriental and the Occidental perspectives, and both perspectives must be in turn viewed through a temporal lense.

In the East they believe in some form of cyclical life. One dies and is reborn as another being. In the age of God this meant that while your body may die, your soul would pass on to another body and continue living. In this, the age of reason, you live on through your prodigy and the collective. One does what they can to leave the collective a better place than they found it.

Here in the West we believe in a more linear life. Once one dies their soul passes on to the other side, whatever that may be. In times gone this meant your soul would leave your corporal body and pass to the afterlife, somewhere that you cannot return from. There is an interesting but seldom resolved difference between direct and delayed afterlife. That is whether the soul passes to the other world directly on death or waits until the end of time to pass on. In the age of reason we believe that you simply die. Your soul-worth is judged by others and your individual name will go down in the history books.

Both systems answer all three of the aforementioned grand questions:
Question East West
What happens after you die? Rebirth Afterlife
Does God exist? Yes (No) No (Yes)
What is the meaning of life? To live a life of good To live a life of good

As you can see, the first question is really the only one humans have ever disagreed on theologically. The second question is outside the scope of this post, but its a question that's solution lies in contradiction and has, throughout history, always been the sole purview of a priestly class. The third question is a cheat. We ask for a meaning but are given a purpose. A vague answer that really is just a retelling of the question. Rather than questions, I like to appeal to the sun and call them "equations". An equation is itself a truth. All the knowledge needed to solve it is held within the question itself, and all you must do is reorder the question to get the "answer".

I, as all Western men must, fall into the linear view of life. My vision of heaven and the contextualisation of the meaning of life was once explained to me by the son of a vicar. He explained heaven as a convergence of time. And as time converges upon your soul the deeds of your life are judged by the final form of yourself. So as your death approaches, your perception of time speeds up exponentially, making the final moments of your life seem to last for an eternity. In this eternal state you will be dead to the world, living in a world made purely of your own mind. And the details of that world depends on the memories you keep from your life. If they are good memories then your afterlife will be heaven, but if they are bad, you will be stuck in the eternal hell flames of regret. Purgatory could be seen as a period of judgement, as you go over every detail of your life until it merges into one: good or bad. I've always liked this explanation. It comes from a modern mind that was constantly locked in a battle of two zeitgeists: religion and science. Your life crossing across your mind as you trip over is part of this natural process. A process made of scientific jargon of oxygen deprivation and hormonal shifts that hold about as much water as a book written by an omnipotent formless trinity, that is too say: a lot.

Whatever your belief is, the important thing is to have faith in it. Realise that the answers to question A and B are meaningless in the face of question C, and as such you can never live a good life if you are stuck on the fundamentals. I believe this is the cause of many modern afflictions, primarily caused by a lack of faith. Much wiser men than you have found the answer: live a good life. The functionality of which is in question, but the path is clear.

A Chinaman and a Roman take a stroll up a rugged path towards the sun. They are locked in heated debate. Neither shows weakness in rhetoric nor logic: truly matched equally in strength. They both wear two faces. One of stern disagreement and of mortal toil, faced toward the other. The other of childlike glee facing forward toward the light. Together they pass into the light and become birds.

Labels: ,

Tuesday 14 April 2020

Happy Easter

A vision of divinity. A void split in half by a world of light and a world of dark. Seven warriors of light stand against a dark monster born from negligence and fear. Their souls shine as a beacon channeling the collective soul of man. Both parties are born from thought, both battling for form. The heroes stand for the good of all men, but all men must stand for them to give them strength. The seven warriors of light harbour the hero soul of legend. One that is born in equal and opposite to all forces of darkness. They do fight heroically but in vain, for their power is not real, but the power of that darkness that opposes them is. Their appeal to heaven does bring them God's final tool. The seven warriors of light, from one did they diffract do once again combine into one and form the hero soul of the universe. With this the people of the world are awed and look up to the heroes and say, "For what shall we live for if not for God? If not for ourselves?"

With this collective thought a great tremble crosses the land and sea. All men are now one and in unison they sing the songs of the ancients. Energy of all men, living and dead and yet to come, passes equally through them all. With that the Earth Mother is born. Her form eclipsing both the sun and the moon. She ascends to the void and does take the hero soul in her arms. A holy matrimony in heaven between the hero of light and the princess of mankind. United into one the world soul is born. It takes the form of a perfect tetrahedron of order, bounding an infinite kaleidoscopic maelstrom of chaos. The chaos pushes on it's walls, throwing itself against an all-resilient order. It swirls and mixes, and forms the body of a woman. Pure white skin hair flowing free. Her breasts bare and floating in an ocean of coloured thread. Initially curled into a ball, her limbs do unfold and reveal her face: one of uncorrupted beauty, a vision so sweet it drains the stars of their light. Her eyes shut and the threads from the chaotic storm skewer her eye-lids and sew them shut. Blinding her to knowledge and pain.

Her limbs spread until they are fully extended. Her body in the shape of a cross with legs down and arms out. The geometry surrounding her starts to spin. The whir of an ancient machine spurred on by the ever increasing speed and volume of the chants of mortal men. The tetrahedron spins with a ferocity that blurs it's shape into that of a sphere. Time starts to take shape as the beast of darkness rears it's head. The misshapen dark mass strikes with tendrils of serpentine fury, it shrieks in agony as time twists around it's body and the natural process of God starts it's work. Two great tendrils of smoke take form, and twist into a double helix. They pass through space and into the mind. Two snakes twisting for eternity into a black hole. They emerge and strike the World soul in the navel, splitting her body and consuming her womb. The bloody deeds of man spread out across the cosmos as divine entrails. Every sin of man laid bare and sent across the universe in a bloody super rainbow. The world soul smiles as her body dissolves, splitting into strips of human flesh.

As the snakes fade an orb of light appears in the centre of the sphere. At first a point, it soon grows in both size and brightness until it's light blinds all those mortals on Earth and their chanting does stop. The light destroys the vision of every man, but they chose to stay fast, staring at the son. In the orb sits a boy. His body invisible in the searing rays of his mother's dying force. All falls silent and the dark lord does cower as the young boy opens his eyes. Pure serenity falls and time ceases to be. The forces of the world pause and pay tribute to the boy, and space converges upon his being. His eyes now open he whispers a word of God: his name. And hence the apparition of evil did never exist, and the world fell into seven days of night, followed by seven nights of day and then five weeks and five days of rain. Once the rain ceases the world is sunk and all is saved.

Labels: