The surgery has quite literally forced me to pretty much stop everything I was working on. My leg hurts too much to go anywhere and as outlined in my last blog the painkillers fuck with my head too much. I've gotten the dosage pretty much where I need it to deal with the pain with minimal after effects but my senses are still too dull for me to play video games. Well, the games that I normally play anyway, I did play Bejeweled last night for over an hour and did extremely well. But when I tried to play World of Warships I found myself spending extended periods just staring at my screen struggling to process all of the information being thrown at me. It was impossible to make the kind of quick decisions that I need to in order to play successfully. Drawing is at a standstill, not because of the drugs but because I can't sit at my desk for very long without a lot of discomfort and swelling in my lower leg which I need to keep elevated for most of the day. Sadly, my desk was not designed for recovery from surgery.
So for the most part I've just been sitting back, watching a lot of Youtube and of course thinking. I do a lot of thinking at the best of times but now my brain has nothing to hold it back so it's on a roll. And with my senses dulled I haven't bothered to try and put up the normal resistance I usually do to focus on the one or two ideas that flash by that are genuinely interesting. As a result my mind has been a flood of images, thoughts and voices of pretty much every imagining you can think of and probably a few that you had forgotten about. Since I'm an artist above all else I figured why the fuck not open the door to my mind and let you have a quick tour of what's been wrapping itself around the stripper poles of my consciousness.
1. One way trip to Mars.
First of all I don't understand why this is such a big deal to space fans. I mean in colonial times we sent many people on one way trips to the "new world" with little if any real guarantee that they would ever be able to come back. A one way trip to Mars, unless you are being sent to actually die upon arrival isn't going to be a true one-way-trip. You're going to find a way to live there and many, many, many supply ships will drop off enough tools, supplies and other provisions to keep you going for a long period of time. It just makes sense that at some point you're going to figure out how to build big enough machinery and big enough computers (keep in mind the original moon landing was done with the computer power of a standard scientific calculator from today.) to make a space port complete with refueling stations. Sure you may have to wait ten, or even twenty years but it's inevitable unless you die during that time frame. As long as you're alive you are going to make priority goal number 2 (number one being stay alive) figure out how to get back home. That's the only reason to call such a trip "one way." We don't know how to get you back... yet.
2. Crossplay
Since I've gained a couple of new followers you may or may not know that I am developing an affinity for crossplay. I started about a year ago creating a crossplay of my favorite female video game character of all time, Isabella "Ivy" Valentine. However, I reached a point of critical mass and just... stopped. Not being able to attend a single anime/comic convention this year didn't help any but now that my recovery seems to have an end in sight this topic is roaring back to life in my mind. The thing is, other than Ivy, there are no other female characters I really want to crossplay as so I figured I'd make some original characters. This eventually led to what I like to call: "The Light Queen and the Dark Queen." These two are literally the living embodiment of the Yin and Yang one of my favorite concepts of all time. The Light Queen is a Vampiress dressed in a white dress with gold trim and silver jewelry. She wears white hair and black, ornate choker, whiter opera gloves also trimmed with gold and silver claws on her right hand. The Dark Queen is a faery who wears a red and black outfit I'm still designing but is expected to include a tight laced corset and long skirt. The basic theme is "Not all that is light is good and not all that is dark is evil." You can see a hint of the Dark Queen crossplay here:
3. What if Tomb Raider was only about Tomb Raiding?
And I don't mean the run around with guns and shoot up the bad guys kind of raiding. I mean walking around trying to find the artifacts and then deciphering them based on your skills kind of raiding. Brianna Wu complained that the Rise of the Tomb Raider game focused too much on violence but what the hell did she expect? The entire franchise is built on combat so it only makes sense that even the reboot would continue that theme. Still, she is right that it would be nice to see a type of archaeological role playing game where violence simply isn't a necessary element of gameplay. Sure you could throw in the occasional fight against a wild animal or maybe even that one final battle against your rouge contemporary out for fame and fortune at any cost but the bulk of the gameplay would be exploration and puzzle solving. Could it be done? Sure why not? Could it be done under the Tomb Raider banner? Absolutely not but who fucking cares? Create your own new franchise with cinematic sequences, character customization and rpg elements that build up your skills for searching (increasing the distance from an object you have to be to spot it even while hidden), deciphering (exposing more and more text on ancient scrolls/tablets with higher levels), identifying (unlocking more and more information about the background history of an artifact you have found) as well as the basic survival skills you will need to function in the wild for extended periods of time on your own. The basic storyline could be something straight out of the pulp radio genre of the 1930's or it could be completely new, possibly following any number of conspiracy theories about ancient cultures that exist today. Just because that game doesn't have what you're looking for doesn't mean no game can.
4. Combing machine and human.
If you've known me for any length of time at all you've heard me joke about my "dreams of becoming a cyborg." Hell, I was even kidding around with my doctor about replacing my knee with something bio-mechanical. But to many futurists this is no joke. Some even claim that the day is inevitable that humans will become virtually indistinguishable from the machines that we create. Maybe I'm paraphrasing (okay for sure I'm paraphrasing, I'm high cut me some slack.) but this is a genuine concern for scientists as we learn more and more how to create mechanical replacements for our worn out body parts. Could there eventually come a time when the Terminator is out to extinguish all humanity? Or is that the wrong parallel to draw? Sadly, these ENTIRELY different concepts all too often get lumped together by conspiracy theorists who care more about spreading fear and paranoia than knowledge and enlightenment. On the one hand you have humans combing with machines. On the other hand you have sentient machines trying to separate themselves from humanity via our extinction. Our true future most likely lies somewhere between the two. My personal thoughts are that we humans degrade to the point where we can't survive on our own and not even help from sentient machines can save us. So we build mechanical bodies and insert our brains inside them. Maybe this even becomes our new means of reproduction where we grow human brains inside custom built bodies. Bodies that can and will look like anything we want them too. I don't think our extinction will come as a result of being annihilated by computers that are self aware. But rather allowing ourselves to change so much via technology that who we are now is nothing like who we will become.