The Post 50k Rant

Alright, now that I am safely past the goal post for NaNoWriMo with only a story to finish as opposed to 50k words to write, I can sit back a little and write a little something here.

Let's start from the benign shall we?

This year's story is a social commentary of sorts from the small and large scale social turmoil that we see in the world today. Inspired by happenings in Singapore, Hong Kong and even Ukraine, I put together a fictional ``neo city-state'' that is the setting for the three different viewpoints that I explore in the city. The framing device is that of the protagonist doing a history project, and having to interview three people who had lived through a particular era that involved something that was known as the Restoration Conflict. Since that said event happened roughly forty or so years earlier in the time line of the framing device, we run into the obvious issue of the Unreliable Narrator, and in this case, three of them, which is also a subtle hand waving mechanism for me to pay a little less attention to continuity among the three different perspectives as compared to the other stuff that I hard written before the involved parallel perspectives in the writing. In its current state as at now, I have completed two of the interviews, and am in the middle of a segue to bring out the third and final interview before writing a conclusion of the whole affair. I estimate that it will take at least another fifteen thousand words or so before I can claim that the story is done.

But for now I will give myself a break for today (it's Sunday!) and instead focus on validating the 500 generated datasets from work. Yes, it's mind numbing and is a doozy, but like I said before many times, if something is worth doing, it's worth doing right. I'd rather take the pain now to verify the stuff instead of waiting till much later when we need it that I start to panic and patch things together.

Work-wise, there are still a couple of server programs that I need to write, some calculus I need to sort out (logic system, not the stuff Newton/Leibniz invented), and some inane but annoying bugs I need to fix in the existing server program. Some of the stuff can be delayed, but there are a couple that needs to be in ship-shape by Wednesday, which is a tough but not completely impossible call.

And now, for some brain-hurting stuff.

I was reading articles online recently, and came across these two rather interesting stories. I'm linking them below with my own titles:

• Dad's Ghost Car
• My Grandma's Mii

So what was it that I found interesting about them?

The concept of death versus immortality.

I'm pretty sure I had talked something about how one dies twice before, if not here then at some random Facebook post. But in case it is one of those delusions I have, here's the concept again.

One does not die once in reality, one actually dies twice. The first time one dies, one loses one's overt consciousness over one's body. The second time that one dies is when no one can remember what the essence of one is, i.e. one gets forgotten by everyone.

I'm not talking about planar travel and transcendence the way most people might choose to tackle this, I'm merely pointing out that the existence of any person is validated by his/her physical manifestation, and his/her abstract essence of his/her nature. If both are lost, then they have effectively died twice, with little to no chance of recovery.

Funny enough, this concept isn't invalidated by a future archaeological discovery. True, the bodily remains may be found, but a body does not make a person. The words said may capture some aspect of the abstract essence of a person, but it's a snapshot view, not as integrative as the whole interaction that had occurred with the person, and if the attribution is lost, the abstract essence loses its identity and just becomes wisdom of the ages, i.e. you're still pretty much forgotten.

The two stories thus highlighted have provided a new dimension to the notion of ``abstract essence'' of the person. Instead of a snapshot of a single instance, or being locked in the mind as a memory, we have an interactive recording of what the person did. In a way, it's a projection of the person's abstract essence into the space spanned by the interactions permitted in the digital medium. So in the first story, it's the boy's father's driving being captured, and in the second, a symbol that was drawn up by a now deceased grandmother.

There's a certain amount of immortality behind these two stories. They are sort of like memories, but they are also stronger than that, since they capture something that can be shared with other people losslessly. The same ghost driver in the driving game can be experienced by other players of the game in the same way, and the grandmother's Mii can still be involved in in-game interactions. So in that sense, they haven't died the second death.

At this point, I will stop and admit that stupid o'clock cometh, and will end what I'm writing because really, I have no clue what I was getting at. Blame it on the NaNoWriMo-ing I have done.

Till the next update.