There has always been a sense that the past was a far more magical place than the present. The mysteries of the past seem darker, more powerful. But now, the unknown is simply something science hasn't got to yet. Of course, looking backward allows us the luxury of idealization. But the fantasies of the past feel like they had a very real gravitas. Where did that go?
 

Science became the source of the world's miracles. As electricity lit up the world, the supernatural dimmed. Magic failed when it collided with electromagnetic fields. Ghosts faded away under the glare of electric lights. Wires embedded in our walls and strung above our heads blocked out the boogie man, scared off Big Foot and silenced the songs of angels. Miracles and magic were replaced by a blanket of radio waves from radio towers, and the power of the stars could not make it past a web of satellites encircling the earth.

The supernatural was chased away to the wild places of the world while humanity was immersed in electromagnetism. For earlier generations, the cloud of artificial electromagnetism was unnatural, an alien intrusion. But mystery is a force in the universe far more fundamental than those known by science. For newer generations it became their natural habitat. In the electronic soup, mystery began to reassert itself. In the niche left empty by the supernatural, the transrational was born.
 

It is an existence that is born from the mundane world, descendant of the the works of humanity. And yet it is imbued with a sufficiently-advanced technology based upon the mysterious of an spiritually-animate noetic cosmos. The electromagnetic cloud that surrounds modern life is the dreamstuffs that the creative spark can coalesce into reality. It can be shaped, molded and transformed. It can connect into the bioelectric systems that we call life, and can reach into the subtle realms that we know as spirit. We can be explored, affected, modified, improved.
 

Now, the universe is open to us. We can rebuild it. We have the technology.

So. September has been... educational. Character-building. That is, a real pain in the ass.

• So, to get the venting out - Miri has been getting more aggressive over the last few months, but especially in September. She continues to push hard (especially around food) and has been getting physical really quickly and frequently. She's been clingy too - she doesn't want to sleep unless I am laying next to her, so I'm spending a lot of nights with her on her twin bed (cramped, but at least I don't move much when I sleep).
• Partially due to this, I've been getting up later than I intend and getting to work late a lot. And because of appointments and Miri-drama, I've been leaving work early a lot too  My work continues to be super-understanding, but I feel like I'm in a constant state of downward spiral at work.
• Finances have been tough. We had some serious issues withthe main mortgage, but I was able to resolve that. Still some issues with several of the other bills and expenses, however.
• Personal life has been...interesting. I've had another relationship which seemed to be going famously that is turning sour. The reasons are long and complex. But it makes me sad on several levels.
• I've gotten little done on any of the projects I've been working on.

Okay, now that that is out of the way....

• Miri is going to be in respite care for two weeks in October. She's going to be with the same group that took care of her while she was in the group home. She seems excited about it. And I am too. I am not sure what I am going to do. Maybe just sleep a lot ;)
• Eleri has a birthday coming up during that respite time too. I'm excited about that!
• We had a meeting with DDD today. It looks like we have a real chance getting actual support. We are up for a CIIBS waiver and we were told we have a very high-probability of getting it. So, I guess it is too early to get excited, but it seems more positive than we have had in a while. They said the paperwork, final approvals, etc. might take a few months though.
• In the little bit I have been doing on personal projects, it has been going well. I got some really good advice on the RPG I was working on. And on the Second Life programming project, I've been doing some good work (if not very fast work). 

I am in the midst of moving some old posts from a different blog to here.

I am in the midst of moving over a bunch of my posts from an old blog onto here. The old blog was focused on virtual reality and the philosophical world surrounding them.

It’ll take a bit to get to my point here, but bear with me. I think that one of the problems with how people react to the modern world is that they make assumptions about what the progress brings us. Moon’s First Law of Sociology is “Human nature only changes in response to new technology.” And I think that too often, we look at these things not from the standpoint of understanding what we are becoming, but rather through the lens of what made sense in the past

Let’s pair up a few personal experiences here. Just recently, I posted on a blog about finding more people to hang out with, both offline and online. My goal is to become more sociable (a skill I’ve lost some in the last few years). I did say I wanted to know if people wanted to do online stuff with me as well, especially local people, so we could hang out online and offline.  One of the responses I got was someone saying that looking for people to hang out with me online was defeating the purpose of trying to cultivate sociability.

My response was based mostly around the fact that some of my hobbies are specifically online hobbies. I enjoy virtual worlds and Internet technologies, among other things. So I want to enjoy those with other people, both locally and remotely. (As an aside, I’m a big believer in the idea that if you want to develop friends or find dating partners, you should do it while enjoying your other hobbies. I think you are far more likely to find someone compatible).

I think this exchange highlights one of the big paradoxes of the Internet Age: The Internet is becoming a cornerstone of modern cultures on many levels, and yet we usually consider what we do on the net as trivial. An example of this: MC Lars (who is really a geeky musician and often associated with the niche nerdcore genre) has a song “Internet Relationships are Not Real”. Yet, I met my wife of 10 years on the Internet. I know a lot of people who have forged long-term relationships online. But it’s still considered ‘strange’.

Of course, that’s a lot anecdotal evidence. So let’s bring in some science. In the Journal of Communications, there’s a paper called “Looking for Gender: Gender Roles and Behaviors Among Online Gamers“. I found this quote in the middle of it, where they are talking about the fact that they found that, unexpectedly, women who play online games play more hours than men who do. Their suggestion is that women use it as an avenue for social interaction. (emphasis mine)

The desire for communication could in part have been met through game play with romantic partners and/or relatives, suggesting that MMOs may allow (especially younger female) players greater opportunities to communicate with friends/family outside of normal routines. [...] If true, this pattern would be consistent with the general trend in Internet research to find online activities to be more of an extension of offline life, for example, a maintenance tool, than a substitute for it.

So here’s the point I am finally getting to: science is beginning to show that online activities aren’t overall, escapism. Rather they are an extension of a person’s life. And I think that this is one of the key things that will come out of the generations that grow up with the Internet, that the ‘virtual’ world is just way to extend who you are. The future isn’t Extropian transcendentalism, where we shuffle off this mortal coil for the digital aether. Rather it is bolting on the reach the digital age gives us onto who we are.

The future isn’t virtual reality, but rather augmented identity.

We are human and we are always going to be. But what we can do changes with technology. Like augmented reality uses technology to ‘extend’ what you can do/see/interact with, augmented identity is where who we are is extended through the avenue of technology.

What is augmented identity like?

• Decentralized social identity – the people in our life don’t have to be close by. People keep up with friends and family all over the world through email and social media. You don’t have to run into a person on a regular basis in order to be informed on their life. Of course, there’s nothing like real face-to-face interaction. But it seems like now that is being extended by socializing in ‘the cloud’.
• Simultaneous multichannel communication – my father-in-law mentioned to me recently that he noticed how in IM conversations, you often have two threads of discussion going on at once, as people respond out of sync to one another. He said you get used to it. Because of the Internet, texting and IM have made this commonplace and reflexive for some. It’s an asynchronous way of communicating – we communicate in little bursts here and there and hop back and forth between them quickly. Conversations are happening interwoven with each other and thus effectively simultaneously. And it happens across multiple media as well – having IM conversations while on the phone or talking to someone in the room with you. This is second nature to those who grew up with it. And I think that’s the source of the frustration older people have with younger people texting while having conversations while the younger people really don’t understand what the fuss is about. Multichannel communication is natural for the internet type, but not for the pre-digital person.
• Multidimensionality of self – another favorite of mine. Augmented identity acknowledges the fact that people have more dimensions to them than usually gets expressed. There has always been this human experience (I act differently when I am at work as opposed to when I am at home) and some more real life ways (see the SCA). But the extension into the virtual allows people to express these parts of themself in ways that couldn’t otherwise. Second Life is, I think, one of the prototypical examples of that now. Culture in second life has evolved into several noticeable ‘virtual races’ (neko, vampire, furry, dragon, etc.), virtual genders (shemale, hermaphrodites) and even virtual ethnicities (Gor, Uru, and more). While there is roleplaying in all of this, if you look, you find that these are real people adopting personas and customs as an expression of who they are. That person may not be physically a black skinned drow with cat ears, but does the fact that they present themselves as such make it any less a part of who they are?

I am in the midst of moving some old posts from a different blog to here.

When we talk about virtual worlds, usually we mean something like Second Life, or World of Warcraft – something that falls into the Neuromancer/Lawnmower Man/Matrix school of virtual reality. It’s about 3D environments that replicate or extend our world and dreams up uploading yourself into it, leaving your fleshy prison behind.

However, I was looking at a blog post by Brian Solis. In it he has some graphs of virtual worlds, placing them by ‘sector’ and by age group. There’s some interesting info in there. But what struck me is the number of things in there that I’d never heard of, and the number of things I wouldn’t really have thought of as a ‘virtual world’. These include things like Gaia Online, Neopets and Webkinz. This makes me think that what I think of as a ‘virtual world’ is a rather limited definition.

So, it occurred to me that this idea needs to be taken further. Once, William Gibson said that cyberspace was where you were when you were on the telephone. And I think this is really one of the great revelations of the information age. From the telephone forward, we have been visiting virtual worlds.

The basic facet of virtuality in all of its forms seems to be the disassocation of self from physical place. When we are on the telephone, we are communicating in real time with someone who is not sharing the same space. This is a different sort of interaction than in earlier communication-over-distance. That was just writing letters – passing messages back and forth. But the immediacy of real-time conversation has a different effect, I think. Instead of just messages, it becomes a shared experience. In essence, you were both ‘there’. There just wasn’t an actual ‘there’ involved.

At that point, ‘there’ becomes a consensual construct. Rather than a place, it’s a point of reference for the experience and gains a measure of reality, one that is completely subjective. Humans can only really think of such a thing in terms of place. So when we talk on the phone, we are ‘on’ the phone, we are ‘in’ a virtual world, etc. Any place where we can have a experience that uses a non-real point of reference instead of place can and should be considered ‘virtual’. Not just your 3D worlds, but telephone conversations, IM chats, IRC channels and more. And even non-realtime interactions that provide that sense of place – BBSes, roleplaying games, etc – reach into the realm of virtuality.

So when we talk about the virtual, we have to realize that this is actually an umbrella term with fuzzy edges. And any exploration of virtuality has to look into these areas as well.

tl;dr summary: not dead yet

So, it's the home stretch of summer. Miri starts school on Wednesday. The only day I don't have off between now and then is Tuesday, and we have some small respite for Eleri arranged for that day. 

We survived the first summer with Mirriam since she was in the group home. This is a big thing. In fact, we did a lot better this summer than we did the summer before she was in the group home. That's a major victory for us. We have CPS out of our hair (especially the well-meaning but completely aggravating case-worker) - there help eventually became as disruptive and stressful as it was helpful. DDD has us on a list for a support waiver.

School gives us a chance to regroup. I'm not expecting any miraculous changes, but at least we'll have more of a chance to rest during the week. We have some actual respite opportunities in our future: Miri is going to be at 6th grade came for two overnights this month. And then in October, we get a two-week chunk of respite. Plus Miri's teacher (the saint that she is) has been taking Miri for one overnight per month.

I've managed to squeak in some time with In the past few months. The vacation we had in July where we went camping and geocaching in central Washington was terrific. It reminded me just how much I like being around Eleri and spending time with her. I've been taking a little more care to spend time with her as well. We've been watching TV shows together on Monday nights, and we've been playing Guild Wars together occasionally. On our last night without Miri, we sat down and played Yahtzee (yeah, I know SO romantic. But it was really nice). I'm looking forward to more with Eleri.

On the people from, I've been trying to reach out a bit more to people. I've been talking to people online a bit. I've been chatting with the Deb's I know while at work (I seem to know a lot of Debs). I met a lovely woman on OKCupid (Hi Sarra!) that I've been chatting with almost non-stop for a month now and am quite smitten with her. I plan to actually meet her face-to-face next week. I've managed to find someone at work who is poly-friendly and we've been chatting a lot as well - it's nice to have a friend at work who understands that sort of thing. There is a possibility to hang out with some other friends as well.

While I am at work, we have been loaning our van to a couple we are friends with, as their car broke down. It's been occasionally awkward in terms of planning, but it has been really important to me to help them out. It's nice to be actually giving instead of taking all the time. Plus these people are some of the small group of local people who continue to step up to help us. 

I've got a few projects I'm trying to work on. I am working on a FATE-powered Myst/D'ni RPG. I've been considering it for years, but I've finally started working on it. While I wouldn't mind something commercial, I am not expecting it. Rather I'm doing it for the love of both the system and the background. Also, I'm sort of cutting my teeth on some real RPG writing, as I have another RPG idea I'd like to do. I have no idea what I am doing, but I hope to actually try to approximate some quality with the Myst RPG. 

I have a programming project in Second Life that I need to get off my ass on. I just have to get to sit down and work on it a bunch. It has been really hard to focus on, but maybe with the little respite from the school year I'll be able to move forward. I'm also considering getting back into gaming. There is a Steampunk LARP that I want to try. And I'd love to play a game of Dresden Files or Nobilis (I don't know anyone running any games however). I'm considering another try at running a game, but I'm wary. Every time I try that lately, life overwhelms me and I have to drop it.

Um, what else. I have a kitten. We are deep into the Crazy Cat Lady cat population level. But one of them I've pretty much fallen in love with. She sits on my shoulder! (In fact, she is there right now). It's really nice to have a pet I connect with.

Finances are... messed up. While we have had some serious unexpected bills this summer (especially medical bills for these kittens - oi!), I think I'm just really crappy at managing money. I'm behind on several bills. I've gotten used to the fact that my credit is completely hosed and probably always will be. And I'm going to have to try some extreme maneuvers to get the primary mortgage under control. That's a constant stress.

Well, I think that is all I can remember for now. I'm sure I have forgotten something very important - I always do. But I'm tried of typing ;)

• "Why You Are You is a bad idea for in cavern RP"
• "I know more about linking books than RAWA"
• "Why the DRC Liaisons were a good idea assassinated by the community"
• "Myst destroyed the adventure game genre"
• "How infighting in the community killed Myst Online"
• "Syndey Austin was the most exciting thing to happen on Myst Online"
• "MOUL should just move over to Second Life"
• "The Guild of Writers is an elitist oligarchy"
• "Only Cyan can make good content"
• "Tehl Nava was a persecuted genius"
• "Why Uru needs an FPS mode"
• "The Myst series needs more sex"
• "Cate Alexander and Marie Sutherland should admit their forbidden love"
• "Riven is the worst game of the series"
• "The Uru firefly puzzle is the best one in the franchise"

Today is the Summer Solstice. However, that is only a small portion of why today is a special day (for me at least). Ten years ago, I stood in the Portland Rose Garden (in a kilt, no less) and said my vows to the lovely Eleri. We didn't get legally married until over a year later, but that's purely an interesting factoid.

I'm sure I could get all sappy. And I probably will this weekend at our anniversary BBQ (which you should come to if you can). But I can put it very simply: I love Eleri, and am proud to be her husband.

Another interesting factoid: The majority of marriages with special needs children get divorced (higher than the overall average of divorce, mind you). It's been a hard ten years. I've been through enough pain to break me, several times over. But I have survived. And even more important, WE have survived.

Eleri has been my wife for ten years. That's a decade. A decade ago, I wasn't even sure if I was capable of sustaining anything for more than a few years, much less a decade. But here we are. And I expect another decade at least.

Happy anniversary, my love.

The Altanean city of Eusebes is home to EPIC's only permanent installation in the Atlantean Confederacy of Sovereign Nations. Eusebes is on the western coast of Atlantis, in the Nationality of Azaes (one of the ten member nations of the ACSN). To the east, the Theran mountains rise quickly, taking up the remainder of the Azaes. At just over 9 million people, Eusebes itself has more people than New York City. However its surrounding metropolitan area is much smaller (due to the geographic location of the city in respect to the Theran mountains), for a total of 15 million or so.

It is not a seat of political power; the capitol is in Machimos, and the confederate government is centered in Atlas, in the Nationality of Atlas. However, Eusebes is certainly the cultural and economic center of Atlantis. Eusbeses was the most prosperous of all of the Atlantean ports and has been throughout most of its modern history. It feeds its dense population with a combination of an extensive fishing fleet, heavy imports from the Nationality of Autochthon to the south. After the Collapse, the city underwent a massive economic crisis, as all of its trading partners were no longer existent. However, financial institutions and Azaesian ambassadors pushed an aggressive agenda of establishing new trade routes and treaties with the European Union, Mexico and eventually the United States once tensions eased between the two countries. The primary source of the trickle of Atlantean technology and resources (such as orichalcum) has been the port of Eusebes.

After EPIC's failure to get a permanent presence in the US, they focused on Atlantis, to give it a strong foothold onto the western side of the Atlantic Ocean. Azaes was more than happy to oblige, and EPIC Eusebes has become the command center for operations in the Western Hemisphere.

EPIC Eusebes is a large military-style installation on the southern end of the metropolitan area, with its own shipyard. It runs separately from the main electric grid thanks to a gift from the Atlantean government of an array of their famous orichalcum foil solar panels. About half of the installation is dedicated to communications and intelligence work.

However, what EPIC Eusebes is known the best for is Team Xiphos, its Special Operations, Response and Deterrent (SORD) team. Xiphos is the first of the so-called 'exotic super teams' to gain international notoriety. EPIC has been using them as an example of their effectiveness, and the Eusebes media have adopted them as a favorite subject.

Team Roster:

Orichalcum - A construct built from the metal of the same name, dedicated to the Greek goddess Athena. Orichalcum does not come from the modern Atlantis, but rather was buried in the floodplains of Spain for millennia. The Collapse reawakened her and she made her way to the modern Atlantis as the closest thing to what she was built to defend.

Techgnostic - An American occultist in his late 30s with a unique ability to meld paranormal abilities with high technology.

Truncheon - A former officer in the 2nd Battalion of Britian's Royal Gurkha Rifles, Truncheon was recruited for extensive training in the UK's Special Air Service, where he distinguished himself. After receiving crippling injuries in the line of duty, he volunteered for the first of the British Army's super-soldier programs. He is a middle-aged Nepalese man with dual Nepal/UK citizenship. He acts as the team leader.

Rave - Rave is a stout woman in her mid 20s, half-blooded Oiorpata (one of the indigenous people of Atlantis). She's completely resistant most forms of damage less destructive than a hand grenade.

Ryder - Ryder is the team's engineer, and uses a custom battlesuit that can change into a motorcycle. Her lesser known ability, however, is that she is an incredibly powerful telekinetic. She uses her ability to control and supplement her battlesuit. She is a native Atlantean woman with frizzy blond hair.

W.I.N - Wide-area Injustice Negation. WIN is an experimental robot designed by EPIC scientists, a prototype for what is hoped to be a standard for EPIC's urban forces.

I love my Kindle. Sure, there is the shiny, cool gadget thing going on. But I really like being able to have all sorts of books right there without having to lug a bunch of books around. Surprisingly, what I am finding the coolest thing is the display. It only takes power to actually change the screen, not keep it going. The eInk display just feels more real than a computer screen.

I've been using it to read gaming PDFs as well. This is sub-optimal, to be sure. Most PDFs aren't designed to reflow based on the device, and I am sure the Kindle PDF reader is just displaying the page as an image anyways. And gaming books are usually 8.5 x 11 in format. Because of this, the text is really small and it takes a bit of rangling with the zoom to get it to where I can read it. But even then, it's nice to have.

Now if someone would just hack up a dice roller for it ;)

Suddenly recently, it finally sunk in all of the way to my bones that I'm not a child. I've always had a problem feeling like an adult - I've always felt like I am just masquerading, that I'm really just the irresponsible kid I was in college. Like every 'adult' in the world knew more than me. Now, I have always known intellectually that isn't the case. But now, it's penetrated to all levels of my psyche.

In a way, it's very scary. There was some comfort in feeling like the world was, in general, better than me. It gave me a sense of hope for the world. Now, I'm sort of disappointed. At the same time, there is some freedom to it. I'm just not sure what I want to do with that freedom.

It still confuses me that the people I reflexively assume to be peers are no longer so. I think of late 20/early 30 somethings as my peers. But that's not who I am. I'm in striking range of 40. I really am middle aged. Heck, I'm a middle aged, balding fat guy. If I flirt with one of these people, I fit into the 'creepy old guy' category.

Now, this really isn't about age. It's about realizing that my personal cultural environment has changed significantly, and the fact that I am finally feeling it emotionally. I think this is hat triggers the mid-life crisis thing. Most guys try to recapture that youth, get back to who they thought they were.

But I know that's not for me. That's not who I am anymore. I just have to figure out the way forward.

I have a phobia of apocolypse. I mean, I guess the end of the world is a reasonable thing to be afraid of. But for some reason, claims about the end of the world make me irrationally paranoid. While I didn't believe the May 21st thing, it made me really nervous. Y2K made me really nervous. There was a story during the BP oil spill about methane buildups below the Gulf of Mexico that stressed me out so much that I had trouble sleeping.

Even as a kid, the Cold War threat freaked me out like crazy. There was that big TV miniseries, the Day After. My parents watched it. I was afraid to come in the room.

Just one of those weird things.

Miri spends most of her time singing along with YouTube videos. It is an actual obsession - she often doesn't want to leave the house, and she becomes violent if interrupted (especially if we tell her to turn it down).

On a certain level, it actually makes me happy. I know that Miri will never be a contributing member of society. But it is nice to see Miri doing something that makes her happy. Of course, it has made her easier to deal with - she doesn't quite need the level of supervision she needed before. But, it's just nice to see her happy, it's nice to see that she's found something in the world that she really cares about.

I haven't been blogging very much. I've stopped using LJ except to read certain friends. I just feel like I ahve so little to say. I tweet little aphorisms as they come to me. I try to keep them meaningful. The 140 character limit has helped me refine many of these ideas - cut off the fat and get to the meat of the idea, with the essential words I need.

But there is something cathartic about just typing a lot about a topic. I'm a pretty verbose person. But I'm just tired of writing long posts about how my life sucks. I want to add something of substance to the digital aether, not just another sob story or rant.

In some ways, I've developed a Zen about my life. I realize that unless the nature of our life changes dramatically, our house is going to be a pig sty. By the same accounts, I realize that I'm not going to be a social person, that I'm going to usually choose to have time by myself, play on the computer. I realize that Eleri's medical problems are not going to suddenly abate, and that she does the best she can within the limits her body sets on her. I realize that I can't expect my daughters to have a life that can be classified as normal. I realize that Miri is always going to hit me, and that she can't really control herself.

While some of these things will always bother me, I've come to realize that they don't have to as much as one might expect. Miri still loves me, and she is so excited when I come home from work. She will randomly tell me she loves me. Corri is a good person, compassionate, and as long as she's a good person, does it really matter if the standard school experience doesn't work for her? Eleri is still beautiful, intelligent, sexy, creative and I love her dearly. Does it matter that her body won't let her keep up with the laundry? Playing video games makes me happy. Coding in SL makes me feel like I am accomplishing things. The majority of the time, I have a reason to wake up in the morning. Can you really expect more from the universe?

(this is just a brain dump of ideas for the Collapse background - the idea is to have a pseudo-comic book world with some grittier elements)

The first few years after the Collpse were chaotic, as the world attempted to recover from the sudden shift. How well various world governments held up was largely a factor of how much bureaucratic inertia they had. Advanced and fairly nations made the transition mostly in tact. Small third world nations that were at the brink of revolution or in extreme instability were triggered by the confusion around the collapse. Some more stable areas held together until the world began to notice the rise in exotics. These exotics became the vanguard for several coups, revolutions and military actions throughout the world, especially in the Middle East and Mid Africa.

Here is a disorganized list of various events in those years:
* Several US naval vessels disappear in the Atlantic immediately after the Collapse. Investigation leads to the discovery of the new Atlantean continent. Tensions flare as the US and the ACSN (Altantean Confederacy of Sovereign Nations) blame each other for the disappearance of naval vessels, and there are minor skirmishes between fleets. Over the next few months, hectic dimplomacy takes place (with the support of the UK and the UN) that leads to an end to conflict.
* Previously unknown and seemingly unused networks of cabling (of an unknown substance) are found in Seattle, Hong Kong, Sydney, Madigascar and Amsterdam. Testing shows that they can be used for telecommunications and power transmission and that the networks seem to be connected despite having no evident connection.
* Riots break out in Detroit, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Calcutta, Cairo in the months following the Collapse.
* Tibet declares itself sovereign from China and successfully repels Chinese troops. Air strikes on the area seem to have no effect.
* US Congress passes a law that makes eye witness accounts from before the Collapse inadmissible in court. Most modern contries follow suit.
* Journalists produce evidence of herds of wild unicorns found in the US Midwest.
* Sri Lanka reveals a previously unknown nuclear capability.
* University of California at Berkely researchers demonstrate repeateable experiments based off of ancient alchemical and esoteric texts from the European medieval period.
* China fields the first military exotics in conflicts with Tibet. Tibetan monks display preternatural abilities and repel the Chinese forces once again.
* An unnamed exotic releases an explosion of purple flame and smoke in a suicide attack on an Israeli settlement north of Jeruselum. Hezbollah takes credit for the attack.
* A sudden blackout due to a 'curtain of darkness' occurs in Atlanta. During the blackout, three jewelry stores, one rare coin shop and a high end electronics store is robbed.
* The US Supreme court overturns a lower courts decision on a controversal Ohio law which would require exotics to register their abilities as 'lethal weapons', citing the clauses in the US Constitution on the right to bear arms and illegal search and seizure.
* The US Marshal Service begins publicizing a '15 Most Wanted Exotics' list.
* Due to increased incidences of violence and crime across the world involving exotics, 34 nations enter into the EPIC treaty, creating the Exotics and Paranormals International Command. The US takes part in negotiations, however, the US Congress does not ratify the treaty, as it includes provisions for local law enforcement powers for EPIC agents and representatives. Individual states (California, Washington, Oregon, New York, Florida, Pensylvania, Hawaii) pass provisions for joint law enforcement measures with EPIC representatives. A case by the federal government to block these as unconstitutional is defeated in appeals court. The Supreme Court does not elect to take up the case.
* Members of the Westboro Baptist Church are attacked while protesting a military funeral by a group of paranormals calling themselves 'The Hand of Morrigan'.
* NASA discovers large glass objects in geometric designs across the far side of the moon.

I'd like to say that the Collapse changed everything. That would be true to dramatic form, wouldn't it? But I can't say that. Not with any certainty at least.

The eggheads have been talking about the inconsistencies of quantum reality for decades. They go on and on about locality and the speed of light and multiple universe theories. The Collapse gave them a few answers. For some reason, who knows how many of these quantum realities collapsed into our universe. Or maybe we collapsed into some other one. Who knows?

But since then, all of these realities have been overlapping. Places, people, histories, all co-existence in the same reality. I remember two distinctly different childhoods. I can't tell which one was the real one. So that's why I can't say anything about the time before the collapse with any certainty. I don't know which actually happened. Or maybe they both happened, and then they really haven't changed that much, have they?

Since then, things have been different. Sure, most of the people of the world weren't directly affected. Their past is as clear to them as it has always been. But it's not uncommon for people to have flashbacks - sudden memories of things that happened to some alternate version of them, bursts of insight that come out of nowhere or skills they didn't know they had. Everyone knows a handful of people who have had that. Or at least claim to. A small few, like myself, have had a bit more of that. Multiple sets of memories, or a different set of memories that are completely incompatible with what everyone else remembers. Some of had it since the Collapse, but others still wake up one morning to find their personal reality very different than they expected.

Some people have this little bubble of their own reality. People who can fly, people who can shift their body from one of their histories to another, people who operate on different principles of biology and physics. Some who seem to operate off of a reality made of magic instead of science. These are the people the government calls exotics and paranormals.

The world itself was not exempt. It has little flashbacks all of the time. Things appear and disappear. Suddenly the laws of physics will be slightly different for the afternoon. Or they will change and stay that way. During the Collapse, a continent rose in the Atlantic, very much like the US, but with the name Atlantis (in their history, America is a mythical land in the Pacific - true story). People have seen herds of unicorns and manticores roaming the country side.

Surprisingly, society has held together over the last decade or so since the collapse. We're all a bit more neurotic, but we have survived. And things are a bit more erratic.  The tabloids are full of exposes on how this celebrity is actually an exotic, or that celebrities movies never really existed. New CSI units have been established, trained specifically in forensics that take post-Collapse uncertainty into account. Technology from the Atlantean Confederacy has started to show up in markets all over the world. Unfortunately so have Altantean drugs, like vril and street soma. People have taken the law into their own hands, armed with their new-found ability to defy reality, and battles between exotics have been seen in the skies above almost every major metropolitan area in the world. Conservative radicals in the US insist that the president's birth and childhood come from an alternate universe and thus he doesn't qualify as a 'natural-born citizen'. Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and Kirt Cobain sightings are up 2000%, according to CNN.

So there is a lot different. Or maybe this is how it has always been, and only the memories of the world have changed.

There have always been heroes. Often, heroes are unsung - they perform feats no one ever hears about, but the affect the world nonetheless. Usually, that is all there is to it. Life goes on, with small bright spots of mankind's potential flaring here and there.

But there are times when that is not the end of the story. Occasionally, there are those heroes whose acts are glorious, and the fabric of the world takes notice and rewards the hero in kind. For these people, their lives become infused in glory, and their glory leads them to greater heights, far past the boundaries of normal men. No longer do they live mundane lives, but lives that are epic, fueled by the own epicness of their lives. We still hear their echoes through history. The ancient Greek heroes were among their number. As were the incarnations of Krisha, the Judges of the Hebrews, the Knights of the Round Table and more.

It may seem like, in the modern world, that those glorious heroes who break the boundaries of the mundane world are gone. But it is not so. A new age of glory is slowly emerging from the global consciousness, like a infant struggling to crawl. The world, post-modern, global, electronic, once again sees glory, and rewards it in kind. Once again,
there are those who are Epic. And their Kung Fu is strong.

Epic Fu is the power of awesome given metaphysical potence.

The power of Epic Fu is much like the fulfillment of a mythic archetype - the power comes from embodying that awesomeness. This is not to say that the power of Epic Fu comes from belief of others (or ones belief in themselves), or that one can only be Epic in specific ways. But rather that culture often defines the starting point for awesomeness. Once one is Epic, however, it is their level of awesome that drives it. A master of Epic Fu does not fulfill an archetype or myth - they create it.

It is important to remember that epic does not require that it be 'good'. Selfish, malevolent and destructive people be Epic - in fact, they tend to be awesomely evil in a super villain sort of way. Nor does Epic mean 'success' - on one side of the coin is Epic Win, but on the other side is Epic Fail.

No one knows where it comes from, nor is there any known way to intentionally trigger it. It seems that even the smallest awesome thing (a great put-down or quip at a cosmically significant time, an act of kindness that triggers a karmic debt, etc). can suddenly put one on the path to Epic Win. In essence, one becomes karmically interwined with a mythic world, filled with fantastical drama. The majority of people faced with this will unknowingly let it pass by, and then it is gone. But those that respond in kind find themselves further bound up into that world.

Once one acquires Epic Fu, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Epic Fu operates both in material and dramatic realities simultaneously, and is subject to the necessities of both. The individual can do more and more improbable or impossible things as their awesomeness increases. But the tropes of an epic life swarm them like flies - terrorists will take their family hostage, secret organizations that protect the world from evil will cross their path, etc. The more you respond to these epic events in epic fashion, the stronger it gets, both in the individual and the things left in their wake.

This means that the practice of Epic Fu is filled with improbable things that make dramatic sense, but are unrealistic. For example, that secret ninja clan that really does have the rumored powers of Ninjistu would never occur by itself. But they were an Epic adversary at some point, so events fell just right for them to exist. And as long as they keep being those awesome ninjas, they will be out there.

There are other things in the background that are fantastic elements, of course. What separates Epic Fu from them is the fact that Epic Fu bootstraps its way into creation and supports itself in the same way. Epic Fu exists because it is awesome for Epic Fu to exist. This leads to a lack of internal consistancy that maddens practicioners of more organized mysteries.

Big day, right? The great boogey man of the 21st century. An atrocity was done at his direction, and it was the great kick off to 21st century global politics. Osama Bin Ladin is dead.

People are celebrating. They are firing off fireworks in our neighborhood. I don't blame them. A tear came to my eye, because there felt like justice had been done.

But reality is not that clean. Miri burst out of her room. There was fireworks and it scared her. We calmed her, and she looked at me and asked "Ask them to stop, please." And my heart wrenched. It seemed like a great day for justice. And my daughter just didn't want to be scared by the loud noises.

One person says they celebrate the death of no human, no matter who they are.

Another says they don't believe it - it's simply too easy to fake this sort of thing. They say it's just a move of the puppet masters in our government. And even if it is true, then it'll just martyr him.

Another, who lost a loved one in 9/11, says that it doesn't change much - their loved one is still dead.

One person is glad he is gone, but the glee in the death freaks them out.

One mentions that a bunch of people chanting USA actually seems really creepy.

Already, the jokes are beginning. I can hear the rumbling of flame wars throughout the Internet. Already, Democrats are mounting the "we got him and you didn't" wave. It spreads across the digital aether like a plague.

CNN keeps saying it is a historic day. Maybe it is.

And every once in a while, my young daughter asks me, in fear, if the fireworks are coming back.

Tomorrow, the politicos will be spinning things so hard that the wind will alter global weather patterns. Many will be affirmed in the superiority of their country. Many will have closure now that justice is done. It'll be just another case of ammo in the culture war.

Where I am I going with this? I don't know. In the end, all I am sure of is that there is very little in the universe of which one can be sure.

I've been looking at Super Hero RPGs and games lately. One thing I have always liked about the Hero system is how generic and flexible it is - you can build pretty much everything for what it has because it focuses on effects, not source.

I've always wanted to play with designing a system like that, and since I've been on a serious FATE kick for a while, I decided I'd try coming up with a basic skeleton of a system for a FATE superhero system in that flavor. Yeah, I know several flavors of FATE have power systems (I've read several of them) and it's a common topic on various threads. But I wanted to take a hack at it myself. If you are not familiar with FATE, a lot of the terms won't make sense to you here.

Anyway, I'd love to have comments, suggestions, critiques, etc. It's fragmentary so don't expect completeness. I haven't thought about character creation, point systems or any of that yet.

Powers
A power is a set of effects with an aspect (called a Facet) and a number of Features which fill out the details.

Effects
 An effect is a trapping that comes from the power - a stunt of some sort that describes function of some part of the power. While there are a lot of possibilities, these effects usually fall into one of the following categories:
 * Stress - The power causes stress on the target of the power. The power has to specify what stress track is affected, and to what extent. The amount of stress can either be a flat stress level or it can be in addition to shifts from a roll (if appropriate).
 *  Damage - This power causes damage, that is it directly inflicts consequences. The power has to specify the level and type of the consequence. The power can, optionally, specify a specific Consequence.
 *  Block - This power creates a block of a specific type. What it blocks needs to be specified, and whether the strength of the block is a flat amount or a bonus in addition to shifts from a roll (if appropriate).
 * Manuever - This power is a manuever to add or remove a temporary aspect. The type of aspect that can be applied or affected has to be specified by the power, as well as any skill roll needed to apply it. Additionally, if that aspect is sticky or not will need to be specified. Like any manuever, applying the aspect gives a potential of a free tag.
 * Resistance - This power allows the target to resist stress and/or damage of a specified type.
 *  Movement - This power allows the target to move in a way they could not normally.
 *  Assess - This power allows the target to make an assessment in a manner they normally would not. What sort of assessment can be made has to be specified by the power.
 * Declare - This power allows the user to make a declaration of some sort as determined by the power. Usually, this will be a very specific declaration (i.e "The user can breathe underwater"). Powers that summon creatures or items would fall under declarations.
 
 Bundling Effects
  Some powers might have multiple effects that happen simultaneously. For example, a fire blast could do stress and apply a manuever of "On Fire!". These effects are just bundled into the same power, and happen at the same time.
 
Facets
 Powers have at least one Facet, which is an Aspect that applies while the power is in use. This Aspect can be invoked and compelled like any Aspect. Types of possible facets include:
 * Manifestation - The facet describes the nature of the power. This could describe the mechanism of the power, the 'type' of damage or stress a power does, etc.
 * Appearance - This facet describes a special effect that accompanies the power (aura of dread, lightning down from the sky, etc).
 * Method - This facet describes something about how the power is activated. It could be a magic incantation, a required stance, a set of important chemicals, etc.
 
Features
 A feature is a catch-all term for parts of the power that are not an effect nor a facet. You could think of these as stunts for the stunt that is the power. A few features are requires, while others can be added as needed.
 
 One feature that a power will always have describes what it takes the activate the power:
 * Passive - The power is always on without any insigation form the user.
 * Action - It takes an action to actively activate the power.
 *  Supplimental Action - Using the power counts as a supplimental action while it is being used.
 * Reactive - The power activates only in response to certain events.
 
 The other required feature indicates the range of the power:
 * Self - The power only affects the user of the power
 *  Touch - The target has to be touched by the user to affect the target.
 * Close Range - The target does not have to be touched but has to be in the same zone to be affected.
 * Mid Range - The power can affect a target up to one zone away.
 *  Long Range - The power can affect a target up to two zones away.
 
 Other features are very dependent on the nature of the power. Here are some examples:
 * Cost - The power costs something to activate and/or maintain. This can be stress, consequences, or Fate points.
 *  Skill Roll - A skill roll is required to use the power.
 * Shape - The power can affect a space of a particular shape. Area Effect powers are often a sphere shape. Other common shapes include beams, walls and cones.
 * Modal Effects - The power has multiple effects, but only one can be used at a time.
 * Item - The power comes from some sort of obvious item - a device, artifact, etc. This makes it easy to target, disarm, etc.

I've been playing Champions Online lately, which has reminded me that I really love superheros. I honestly never got into comics all that much, at least not since early high school. But I love superheroes. I especially like superhero games, and super hero worlds. I've been soaking up a lot of super hero backgrounds in quick succession lately - Champions, City of Heroes, Wild Cards, GURPS Supers (their IST background), etc.

Of the many RPG-related projects I have always wanted to do, making a super hero background has been one of them. However, I've never gotten a good handle on it. I like the Wild Cards background as it does try to inject some realism into the genre. So I keep trying to think of ideas for the basis of a world where super heroes exist, but with some room for some more of the four-color elements.

For example, how do you explain the fact that superheroes parade around in garish outfits? Or that there are four-color crime fighters or supervillains at all (why fight crime when there are probably hundreds of other things you could do with a super ability? Why be a supervilliain when just knocking over liquor stores is good enough for your super strength?)? What about the rest of the world? Are they going to put up with the super fights that destroy the skyline happening again and again? Why not just move away? Etc.

I'd love to hear suggestions on it.

One idea I had is there would be some reason for the tropes of super heroes to exist. Instead of hand waving them - they would be necessarily to the existence of them. Maybe something that requires that if you have super powers that you have to square off against other supers? Maybe there is something that requires the super hero outfit and name (I dunno, something about getting powers only by stepping into  and maintaining a sort of mythic role).

Any ideas?