Being There, In Abyss
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For those who didn’t quite get the reference description of Asmodeus in the conversation about Egary Gygax, that is exactly what Smody looks like! Although, fortunately he typically wears more clothes!
Did they get Nobel Peace Prizes also?
I didn’t know that the Nobel committee considered work on other planes.
You know, now that you mention him by his true name, I haven’t seen the Archdemon Kissinger in close to a century. Wonder what he’s been up to?
He’s considered one of the Courts’ foremost authorities on the (ab)use of power. Well known that if you wanted to “inadvertently” spawn a genocide, call him.
That is theoretically true, however, that is a very long term view that only truly old demons have.
Most of the younger demons (<3,000 years) are too recently traumatized to take this perspective.
In part this is because writing systems tend to only reliably last for so long, so eventually, most demon's true names are forgotten. I.e. once a wizard's civilization is existential dust, their old demon slaves don't get summoned and bound that much, since they've been forgotten.
Interestingly, of course, this is something that is discussed in more detail in Book 3...or so T-A-G tells me. I wasn't part of those conversations, so I don't know...well, maybe a few of them, or maybe all of them, but I don't recall.
I mean, how many people on Earth remember the names of demons over 5,776 years ago? (Hint, many of them don't think their planet even existed before that)
Although, of course, they do seem to recall Lilith, and Sammael (although obviously not their true names).
And they are well over 5,776 years; although I won't say by how much because it is impolite (and incredibly painful in this case) to reveal a lady's age.
While clearly not at all parallel, Tom’s travails are reminiscent of Peter Sellers’ beautiful Being There.
The books call to Fog of War, as well.
Yes, very much so. And intentional.
Being There, which I had completely forgotten about brings up the fact that in very complicated times where people are seriously overthinking things, are too serious with themselves, it is often hard to tell the difference between the fool and the Zen Master/Guru. A lot of it is about being hyper “on message” the first does it because he/she has no other message and the other does it because he/she does, but does not want to distract listeners with all that the simple message implies. Get them to accept the base principle and then, eventually everything else will follow.
But it also comes back to mental/political jujitsu, saying just enough for your opponent to hang themselves. In the US, Obama used this strategy very easily on the Clintons and then McCain. Bernie is doing it again, but a bit more subtly. He doesn’t need to say much to cause his opponent to overthink, overreact.
Of course, on the other side, there is the fool who says very simple things because he has nothing else to say. And urges people to blame “the other” for their problems.
And then of course, the Fog of War was a series of events that were interpreted by people with way to much baggage who saw the world through a very specific prism, jumping to conclusions using overreaching assumptions that become self-fulfilling prophecy.
But then, I think many wars are that; at least when you have an otherwise stable level of detente (ignoring the accent). Obviously many wars are simply cases of naked aggression and invasion to steal territory or resources. But in an otherwise stable system, it’s usually over amplification. WWI was a series of overreactions, WWII was interesting in that it was a series of reactions spawned by the end of WWI, that led to acts of hatred/violence and naked aggression and a desire to seize territory and resources as retribution.
Since then, most have been the result of a series of incidents that spun out of control, people over thinking the chess board.
[quote=The Author Guy;3267]Since then, most have been the result of a series of incidents that spun out of control, people over thinking the chess board.[/quote]
The inventor of the armed drone is much more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than Henry Kissinger.To mentally escape an interminable meeting, I was picking at the Astlan universe’s weaknesses yesterday.
The principal problem is that the technological and social development in the various interlinked worlds in the localverse are too close to each other, taking into consideration that other actors speak of personal experience spans counted in hundreds of thousands of years. It’s just too convenient to be plausible.
However, if you look at things from a different angle, and consider the classification of worlds into hightech, medium tech and low tech, if the gods’ mana and animus parasitism actually is the central theme, gods are able to suck enough mana out of a world that it does not regenerate quickly enough for them, and the gods tend to forcefully keep the still mana-rich worlds at a lower technological development level, the real adventure would be the liberation of sapients from these parasites.
The gods would naturally keep the worlds they are leeching off in their nets, interlinked, drop them when they become unviable, and thus they get their chance to become high tech.
Perhaps Mount Doom is really a device to lessen the mana income inequality across the worlds. Mana to the people!
We start to get into this in Book 3. It’s the first truly multiversal volume of the series.
There are a lot of things similar to what you describe happening. Although it is not exactly that straight forward, at least not on every world.
It is not all gods that do this mana sucking, but as has been hinted that is what happened on the Earths, and there will be more discussion of that.
But as has been stated, there used to be a lot more Magic on the Earth variants. The gods were there but left.
Technology and Magic are two different ways of looking at the multiverse. So there are pure tech worlds and pure magic worlds at the extreme, but there is a lot in between. Places where magic and tech can coincide, and places where one is easier than the other. A full spectrum. And how this relates to gods sucking things up??? Not clear yet.
But to get to that, we will have to get to the workings of Law and Chaos and the Gods of Law and Gods of Chaos. Not completely sure DoA will ever get to cover all of this, but there will be hints.
Is this what Tizzy has in his head? (Got mail from China today!)
[img]http://i.imgur.com/nyCEP93.png[/img]Very close, however I am actually using a Vintage Pentium 1. It’s got 4 Gb of RAM and running Windows NT 4.0.
The Edison is basically stuck at 1 GB; but is newer and about the same speed. I do have trouble with some logic errors in my memory now and then, 20 years of cosmic rays will do that to one.
But if the space shuttle could fly with the equivalent of a hardened 8086 processor, that’s good enough for me!
Actually, my biggest complaint is flash. Have a terrible time with it on my Pentium; I have to use an old player on NT 4.0 so movie watching is quite a chore.
Afraid not. It still says copyright, but personally I think it’s because Lilith used to date Richard Belzar and the breakup wasn’t good.
Not Adam bad, but not good. So maybe it’s her blocking it.
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