Bloggish Mutterings

Happy holidays, folks. Been a while since I’ve posted, I know. Less than a year this time, at least! Since you last saw me, there have been… changes — and I’m not just talking about the new website (powered by Hugo and the Academic framework). Since I last posted, I have (in no particular order): Discovered I do not suffer from the potentially-fatal cardiovascular form of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, as I and my physician previously thought.

N.b. — I started this post in January 2016. I finished it today. See the previous post for my reasons, and my apology. In Altered States, the year is 2065. Here in 2016 2017, home automation is a burgeoning field, and domestic technologies are taking off in a very big way. With five decades of technological advancement, just imagine the possibilities… In a previous post we discussed living object networks.

Over a year ago, I said I had a post half-written. It’s about three-quarters written now, and the rest will be up sooner rather than later. The day after, I got rather philosophical, as I sometimes do. The day after that, I went cold turkey on the antipsychotic medication I have to take for bi-polar disorder. Lack of employment and lack of health insurance meant I could not afford them anymore.

Consider a new technology. A form of crude but effective mind control, that can with total effectiveness and no margin of error remove any single memory of group of memories from your brain. Ignore the science and the ethics behind the existence of this technology; it exists, and you have access to it. Would you use that access to remove memories that you didn’t want to have? I’ve been sitting here all day, soul choked and mind plagued by my subconscious running rampant through my past, bringing up memories I’d desperately prefer stayed buried in a corner of my mind — wondering if I would.

So as I’m sitting here looking at vision-based traits for a character with magical eyes, it dawns on me: why buy Blindness? Blindness is a whole -50 points. Seems like a worthwhile amount for such a limiting disadvantage. Consider, however, the following list: Bad Sight (Nearsighted) [-25] Colourblindness [-10] Night Blindness [-10] No Depth Perception [-15] Tunnel Vision [-30] None of those are mutually exclusive, and they add up to a massive -90 points.

As I mentioned in my last post, I started a new game — this one a sort of pickup game run by myself, with a single player. With the right pair, this sort of thing can be immense fun, and this one has occupied most of my waking hours not involving my job search or other games that I play in. This game is being run in a dark fantasy setting, based on Jürgen Hubert’s Doomed Slayers, and then built on that to answer the question of “What do you get if you cross GURPS (Dungeon) Fantasy and GURPS Supers?

So I actually do have a very long and coherent post half-written, more information about Altered States (and houses). But while writing it I discovered just how much research I needed to do for it, and so it’s been a fair bit of a slog… which doesn’t excuse not posting for two weeks! In the meantime, I’ve been attending job interviews (unemployed for four months and counting, now), attempting to adjust to a new schedule for the weekly games I attend (we’ve moved from starting at ten in the morning to starting in the afternoon or evening, and I keep falling asleep!

Holism is the idea that systems and their properties should be viewed as wholes, not as collections of parts, and that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. In Altered States, then, one can consider “holistic technology” — because in Altered States, the Internet of Things has been taken to extremes (though not yet to absurdity. Yet.) It all begins with the ubiquitous computers I mentioned in a previous post.

Francis R. “Dick” Scobee, mission commander. Michael J. Smith, pilot. Ellison S. Onizuka, Judith A. Resnick, Ronald E. McNair, mission specialists. Gregory B. Jarvis, payload specialist. Sharon Christa McAuliffe, first teacher in space. Thirty years ago today, they gave up their lives riding a fire in the sky, furthering our dreams of reaching the stars. They should always be remembered, and honoured. In their memory, theirs and others, we must continue to tame that fire.

First: welcome to all you GURPS Day readers who have found their way here from Gaming Ballistic! There is something that certain other games do very well, that GURPS seems, on the surface, to lack rules for. GURPS is replete with limitations on how often you can use abilities in game — but those limitations are all very concrete, based on time in game: once per day, once per hour, &c.