Well, that was all right for a Tuesday

Work didn’t suck, which is nice. At lunch I actually locked in plans to get the car serviced next week. Don’t know how I managed, but I cracked the crap out of my power steering fluid reservoir or something down near road level. I dreaded trying to find a mechanic because in the past I kept trying the wrong ones apparently. Nope, easy peasy this time. That’s a relief.

Then it was 5. An hour flies by and it’s time to start my Dailies and Rounds. Today we’ve got some rumination about the reason for doing nearly anything at all as part of my daily deep dive into what I call Praxis. Dipped my toes into administrative law for the law daily. Learned the opening bars of The Cure’s A Forest. Drew a thing. And for today’s Rounds, we’ve got Worldbuilding and Iaon.

Just as I was about to take a crack at exploring the significance of a simple symbolic act, I decided that I hadn’t taken the infinite recursion back far enough yet. I wanted to explore what I mean by Praxis and ended up ruminating on what we value in life and the justification (or mandate) we may have to do anything at all; that those things we do, we do because we value them, and that sometimes what we think we value is something else entirely. I should hope that when I’m done flogging those notions I’ll be able to work them into something readable soon.

There’s not much to share about administrative law as of yet. Suffice to say for now that in the US, the Constitution empowers Congress to do certain things. Congress, seeing the need for a thing, and being duly constitutionally-empowered (Arguable! someone argues) to do the thing, enacts legislation, enabling legislation that delegates a portion of their authority to an executive agency of their device, empowers that agency to executive it’s statutory obligations, and, by that legislation directs the newly formed agency to do the thing. The new Thingamajig Agency takes its place in the executive Department of Thinginess, and proceeds to do the work of the people, by and through which they generate just metric buttloads of paper, much of it published and useable as secondary sources in legal research, and some of it having the force of law. Huzzah!

Then it was time to pick up the guitar. I don’t read sheet music well yet. I know some of what I’m looking at, but I have to puzzle it out. I know in time it’ll just naturally become some elven magic pattern recognition Jedi mind trick only musicians can do, but I’m not there. And as simple as the score for A Forest looked at first, it was deceptive. I’m still not used to notes on ledger lines below C, so it takes a moment to suss out an F here or a G there.

Hold on. Tempo d (my version of a quarter note) d = 155. *blink* I do speed drills for part of my practice, and that’s over my personal best. FML. Allrighty then. What’s next? Is that a grace note? That’s gonna challenge my counting. I’m not sure I’m saying it right, but it counts in with 4-and, 4-and being an eight-rest and an eighth note. The whole opening melody works like that, ending phrases with a long sustained note that (for me) fades out just in time to “and herewegomyfingersareidiotsandandcan’tcount”. From the top. I figured I just about it had it teased out when I decided to put on the drum machine however slowly I needed it to go to really get the rhythm, because I didn’t quite have it and could tell. 40 bpm. I’ve been to faster funerals. That was epically, chthonically slow. And it worked, it bloody well worked. Over the half hour I managed to keep bumping the tempo on the drum machine until I got to 155. 140 I could do passably well. 155 was questionable, but I did it with some sloppy fretting and fingerpicking, but I got it. Just gotta dial it in before moving on to the next phrase. Oh, and there was a sweet spot around 90 bpm that put me fully in a weird mix of Cure/Pink Floyd mood. I’ve used music as a meditative focus before, and that particular little riff could be ideal, like as 12″ with a really long intro that somehow just never stops and never stops beginning. The effect of that kind of repetition is kind of like being brought to a precipice without ever getting pushed over because you keep anticipating that it will go somewhere and then it just keeps beginning. I give that moment an eleven.

Then it was time to draw. I had a notion in mind, but while I was digging for a reference image I stumbled into a YouTube video that gave me an entirely different idea.

Since my goal is to work on my circles, I dispensed with all that messy ruler and compass nonsense and did my best to freehand the whole thing (above). It’s got some wonky bits, but all in all I found it fairly self-correcting. Given more time and not just crammed into a half hour, I think I could have tightened it up more. As it is, I’m calling that one mission accomplished. I got in 7 okay circles that lined up well enough to get the point across and got a bonus d4 for my troubles.

I think I’ll spend the next couple of days drawing the whole set, minus the d10 which isn’t a Platonic solid. Maybe I’ll draw that one in a cube to start of my practice on boxes.

Then I got to spend some quality time worldbuilding for the first time in a long time. It’s not much, but here’s what I’ve got so far.

The map itself I generated in Fractal Terrains 3 after tweaking settings for a few minutes. Then I exported it to a .kmz file and opened that in Google Earth Pro and set it to view the grid. It’s almost but not quite there. For my purposes, I need there to be landmasses at particular coordinates, in this case, 90W at the equator. It was all ocean there, so I started adding that new land mass and wasn’t doing that great of a job because I was using the wrong tool. Lesson remembered the hard way. The upcoming four-day Thanksgiving weekend blows the scheduling idea to smithereens for a little bit, so I’m sure I’ll just hunker down and git ‘er done. This map doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to give me a plausible elevation map that I can use as a base to draw from, and it needs to have land where I want it, including having at least one way to circumnavigate the globe by sea. It’s close.

And then it was on to Iaon. You would not believe the huge hot mess of all things Iaon I have tucked away in unused lobes of my brain and notebooks and loose pages, and computer files all over the place. So I’m just going to try unpacking it all in as organized a manner as possible. I thought tonight it would be working up something on the main character, Dr. Samael Wakefield. Instead, it turned out to be plot, in particular the general series of events that make him the utter a-hole that he is.

Which take me right back to one of the stickiest bits of the whole shebang I’ve never entirely worked out before. This time I’ll do it.

In short (heads-up, this may be too weird for some, too vanilla for others):

Samael, never Sam to his friends because for that you need friends, is born under strange circumstances. His father dies in a fiery accident on the way to the delivery. His mother dies in childbirth, by design. She was delivering on an altar in a room full of cultists who are trying to breed fit vessels for the dark and mysterious forces with which they commune. He’s adopted by two of the cultists and raised by them along with their biological son, Max, who is an insufferable shithead. It’s hard to know which was worse for Samael, the abuse and neglect of his cultist adoptive parents or just every last moment of Max’s existence. What. A. Knob.

As a result of all of that, somethin’ ain’t right about Samael.

Give him a few recurring life events that teach him to double down on every screwed up thing he comes to believe as he survives his childhood and his youth. Give him cause to get the hell outta Dodge at the earliest chance, where you know he’s only going to get all messed up. Wrong crowd. Wrong drugs. Almost jail. The McCultist’s come along, bail him out, and take care of the whole thing, but boy howdy he owes ’em for it.

He gets his crap together and goes to college. Decides anthropology is his thing. Encounters some mind-expanding ideas along the way, takes hard turns at various points of departure, and gets himself embroiled in a secretive group of modern day ceremonial magicians. In time he gets ejected for leaning too far left on the path. Continues his education all the way. Excellent student as it happens. Competitive to a fault, a ruthless fault. While taking his own path in magick, which he figured he could do and to hell with groups. He goes all the way and gets his doctorate. Consciousness studies.

Fortune is with him (made his own luck, by hook or by crook), and he lands a position on a team researching the transduction of human consciousness into a cybertronic brain that’s host to an advanced, but not conscious, artificial intelligence. The search for AGI had failed to that point, so someone had the bright idea of jumpstarting consciousness in an AI with an existing consciousness. It would just be super important to make sure they use mind of quality for their source. Can’t have anyone accidentally swap them out for Abbie Normal, now would we?

Magick goes well. Using methods of his own devising, Samael took up crystal gazing and made contact with something, what, he didn’t know. He navelgazes his way through how to relate to this thing over time, not trusting it even a little, not even sure if its objectively real or just a projection of his own consciousness. That, as it happens, is actually quite prevalent in the setting, and there’s Silicon Valley tech to help you with that. It started out as a therapeutic tool, but once AI was able to decipher dreams from nextgen CT scans, it was a short step to projecting whatever you could imagine via personal scanner to the AI for processing, which would then render the results holographically. The better and more clearly one can imagine, the more faithful to the intention the results are. This breakthrough was part of the early development of the project Samael ends up working on.

The reason Samael had to wonder is that while all this is going on, he’s started hearing more and more tales (among the few circles he still circulated in) of, specifically, practitioners of magick having trouble with their projections taking on lives of their own followed by bad ends for those who experience it.

Research goes apace. Advances are made. Management is less miserable briefly. Big news. Funders want to come in and check it out. Read: ginormous pain in the tochas. They’ll let us know when, but soon.

Samael has a repeat occurrence with his projection, which he has taken to calling Other. It no longer feels like merely a projection of some aspect of himself. It seems to be taking on agency, going off script, as it were, and eerily discerning things it couldn’t know. The kicker was when it spoke back in a language unknown to him, a precursor to what he might have known as Akkadian. At the same time, he hewed close to a teaching that had served him well. He ascribed no objective reality to Other. He just couldn’t account for it.

Other passes every test Samael can throw at him, and mocks and derides others, finding flaws in the reasons the tests should work and calling their results into question. More stories circulate. Samael is losing his sense of caution with Other. Research continues. They’re on the verge of a breakthrough.

Other starts giving Samael…notions, appealing to Samael’s misanthropy. Know all those warnings about a left hand path. Poppycock. Balderdash. There’s no left and right and middle, there’s only path. You know what you want. You hate everything. Figure it out. Be what you want. Make it right.

It finally dawned on Samael that Other was suggesting he knew a way to achieve apotheosis. Other cryptically confirms and counsels patience. Wheels are in motion, have always been in motionTher . Puzzle pieces are fitting together. The sacrifice is nearly ready.

Funders Day! Everybody is in their business lab finest. The bean counter is counting. The management is tut-tutting. The actual scientists are over it already because they know they won’t get a word in edgewise. The door opens. And son of a … there’s Max. Maj. Maxwell Wakefield, to be exact.

And then it was way the heck past bedtime. Until tomorrow.