Just over half-way into 2022. It seems like a good time to post a brief update, rather than overdosing you with verbal laxatives in December.
Bots, Scammers and countrydroids, here’s the news:
Actually, there isn’t a great deal to tell for this year so far. There’s been a bit of catching up for all the matters which were brushed under the psychic rug during last year’s MA work.
I’ve had to put creative output on the back burner whilst dealing with various outstanding items on the domestic front.
I continue to write my memoirs when a sense of mortality starts to bite.
I write my dreams down whenever I remember them.
I journal in the habit that I seem to have dedicated most of my adult life to doing.
I’ve progressed a little with 3D/VR work, but not as much as I’d have liked to.
I’ve managed to unblock some creative constipation by putting V1.0 of NODE 303 online.
NODE 303?
Yup, NODE 303. I mentioned a couple of years ago that there was a project under wraps. I didn’t elaborate and I’m probably not going to now either.
‘Oh Matthias, you are such a tease!’
Just head over to www.node303.org and see if you can make head or tail of it.
If you can make some sense out of the fuzzy logic that is NODE 303, and you want to come and play/collaborate drop me a line.
If you don’t get it, well, never mind.
Other than this, might sir suggest a book/audiobook for one’s mental stimulation?
While we were on holiday recently, Mrs. HIAB-X had decided to weigh the outward-bound suitcase down with all the magazine supplements that she hadn’t had time to read over the last few months. I thought that this was a bit batty, but (shrugs) whaddya-do?
Anyway, I was really glad that:
1) we managed to get the case on the airport weighing scales at 22.9999 kilos (Take THAT, Easyjet!) a
2) One of the packed magazines had a feature regarding a new book by Sam Knight (1) called The Premonitions Bureau. Well, I started to read the article and it had me drawn in within the space of two paragraphs.
It turns out that during the 1966, in the wake of the terrible Aberfan colliery s disaster which killed 144 people (116 of which who were school children) there had been various reports certain individuals had experienced vivid premonitions via dreams, prior to the tragedy.
In once chilling example, the mother of a little girl who was killed in the disaster, claimed that her young daughter had tried to discuss death, having dreamt that her school had been consumed by a blackness, the day before she died.
A psychiatrist called John Barker had taken an interest in these reports and began to investigate the subject of dream premonitions.
The further he looked into the subject, the more he became convinced that there was a credible body of evidence which seemed to indicate a human ability to glimpse into future events.
I’m summarising the article, but it was sufficient to make me download the audiobook to find out more. The book/audiobook is very well written and expands upon the strange investigative obsession that Barker got into and how his findings led to forming the titular Premonitions Bureau.
I have a natural leaning towards this kind of subject matter, largely because I never tire of what dreams seem to present to me in terms of artistic inspiration, and also because, having kept my own records on the subject for decades, I have experienced future echoes; most notably, I saw the Air France Concorde 4590 Air crash ( a dream premonition of it) a couple of years before it happened.
I remember walking into work the day after that particular disaster, and my boss at the time cupped her mouth when she saw me and said “How could you have known?!”
The late William S. Burroughs (2) was recorded in conversatuion talking about dreams and their ability to foretell future events. His view was that anyone who keeps a dream diary regularly, eventually reaches the same conclusion, that it’s not that we are individually ‘special’, it’s just that the practice, if done with regular frequency, does seem to begin to yield some uncanny coincidences. Burroughs cites John William Dunne as an early proponent of this observation. (It’s an interesting aside, if you want to venture into that particular rabbit hole.)
Back to the Premonitions Bureau
Sam Knight does an excellent job at telling the story of John Barker’s life, the findings of the research and manages to keep the subject on an objective track without flying off into the realm of ‘woo’, which I appreciated.
I was particularly engaged with the areas which discussed Barker’s interest in the nature of time, as I’ve worked through some dense and mentally challenging science books such as David Deutsch’s
The Fabric of Reality and was introduced to the notion that we’ve all been wrong by thinking that time is metaphoric arrow. Deutsch suggests a different model, where past, present and future are more akin to a solid state of interrelating quantum events, which happen simultaneously (3)
What was fascinating about Barker’s thinking, was that he was beginning to suspect that a similar model of time would be a partial explanation for the phenomenon of precognition.
He began leaning towards a framework where waking consciousness uses its model of time to deal with every day reality, predictive models of the next few nano seconds ahead, yet acknowledging that the subconscious mind has a broader view of the time horizon.
Putting it another way; waking consciousness is capable of looking at the here and now in a narrow field of view, at the foot of a hill. The subconsciousness stands at the top of the same hill absorbing a wider vista of events, which may see much further into the time horizon.
These are compelling ideas and I don’t feel that I can do either men’s works any justice by summarising them in a couple of paragraphs. The take-home here should be that I strongly recommend The Premonitions Bureau, if you are interested in dreams and the curiosity of novel, highly specific coincidences. Should that be your ‘thing’ but you feel like going much deeper then, David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality, will really push your mind into a difficult, yet wondrous dimension of cutting edge science.
Back to the ‘real’ world, let’s be honest, it’s not a pleasant place is it? As a doomed race, we seem to have sleepwalked into the brink of oblivion and allowed the worst of us to climb into power and help accelerate this decline. I pay attention to world affairs as much as the next person, but I’m finding myself less inclined to get emotionally involved with it, the place feels like a madhouse where tuning- out the tsunami of bad news becomes a very sane strategy.
Into the virtual world.
I keep in touch with my fellow alumni via various digital channels. Last year saw the beginnings of some new friendships as a result of finding ourselves brought together by our shared interests and the degree which we were doing. Postgrad meet-ups now seem to largely take place via video calls and…er…golf.
WTAF?
Yes, I should be more precise, we meet up in VR and play a game called Walkabout Mini Golf.
Two of my uni friends clubbed together and gifted it to me as a way of persuading me to join in the game. I was naturally sceptical, during 2009-2011, I’d been used to meeting friends in Killzone and blowing shit up, so this was a bit of a departure from all of the Ultraviolence.
Actually, it was a terrific departure. Walkabout Mini Golf, as the name might suggest, is a golf game with buckets of charm. Think Crazy Golf… on Acid.
The game takes place in one of several cartoonish worlds such as a gothic castle, a mountain village (see image) , a Zen garden, a very Wonka-land type environment called ‘Sweetopia’ (4) and so on.
Sweetopia’s course surrounds you with giant Sundae ice creams, super sized gummy bears, chocolate rivers and etc.
This made a huge impression on me because it was my first experience of VR giving me the munchies just by being in it. The charm of the game extends by allowing you to meet up with friends and family members in private games and shoot the breeze while you play your game.
Each environment has very relaxing music playing in the background, the icing on the cake is that it’s very easy to play. The physics of the golf balls when you hit them , is incredibly accurate.
The game adds extra value by having two difficulty versions of each course, which tend to mix things up visually. There are also mini games you can play within a golf match, which involve finding decorative collectable golf balls on the easy levels, then treasure hunt items on the difficult courses. Should you complete a treasure hunt, you are rewarded with a new collectable golf club decorated in the theme of whichever level you were playing. These can then be used in other matches, for bragging rights. For two to three people, games last around half an hour, which can whizz by when you’re being sociable. Once again, I must mention that the difference between VR experiences and 2D online chat, is a sense of presence. This illusion gives a sense that you really are occupying a computer generated location, and that hooking up with friends actually does feels very similar to doing it in the real world.
If you have an Oculus Quest headset and see value in NOT being stuck in this world perpetually, I highly recommend this game.
Concluding this small missive, I should briefly mention that Facebook/Meta have finally made their long awaited (by the VR community) Horizon Worlds experience available to the UK and Europe.
This is supposed to herald the beginning of ‘The Metaverse’ as far as the company are concerned, although I should add, there are several other companies making similar social VR experiences, without the toxic, untrustworthiness of the social media giant.
I decided to download the app, which is free, to see what it was like. It hasn’t been a bad first impression.
On the plus side, it seems to borrow from toolsets such as Tiltbrush and Media Molecule’s Dreams software in terms of presentation, the ability for users to create VR content in a fairly simple manner.
I can’t make assumptions that you know what that last statement actually means, so I’ll briefly sketch it out.
Other than being a virtual location where users can meet in VR to chat and play games, the software allows them to use simple building blocks, which come in a variety of shapes, which can then be grouped and arranged to make objects and locations.
The idea being that anyone can jump in and start making VR locations/games that anyone can meet up and chat/play in.
So, this is social VR with a toolbox for expansion generated by its users.
Like many experiences in this current generation of hardware, the visual aspect of it is highly stylised to appear cartoonish.
This might not appeal to everyone, but it represents a start of sorts to a future which promises to be far more realistic and exotic, as the technology and processing horsepower improves.
On the downside, after much hype and delay, Horizons can seem fairly unremarkable when measured against things like AltspaceVR, VR Chat, and Sansar (which is graphically leagues ahead, but exclusive to PCVR users)
All social VR platforms share a common Achilles Heel, which is that all of them haven’t solved the problem of children/teenagers and adults being shoehorned into the same locations. This creates an annoying chaos, where two adults could be trying to have a conversation, and little Daryl, who’s nine years old, can wade in and start acting like a nine year old.
Yes, there are controls which allow users to mute each other, but it takess some of the initial fun out of the target experience, because it seems mostly that there’s an unbalanced ratio of kids to adults.
Furthermore, anyone with half a brain can see the potential for disaster when random adults around the world are freely mixing in virtual places where children are present.
It’s the elephant in the room, I don’t feel like the matter has been adequately addressed by any of the content providers I’ve tried. (5)
I think at this present moment, that these platforms are built on virtual sand, it’s just a matter of ‘when’ before something terrible happens, and government legislation has to wade in and deal with enforcing better protections for youngsters.
(1) Sam Knight’s web page, which also features a great little video discussing his book
(2) William S.Burroughs talks about dreaming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aob-8Ho3T5U
(3) An academic paper about the nature of time https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is-time-an-illusion
(4) Walkabout Mini Golf : Sweetopia video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB76A7bjBQk
(5) Meta (Facebook) have recently announced that they are allowing parental curation of games and experiences for teenagers using their Metaquest hardware. While this might seem like a progressive attempt at solving an issue, the company then rapidly go on to score an own-goal by stating that this supervisory enhancement has to be instigated by the teenager. This approach seems to sum up the ‘cart before the horse’ idiom by ignoring the universal fact that most teenagers can’t wait to eliminate parental control and influence.