Ailsglyph Defined

I've been trying to write a series of short stories that I could post on here periodically, but even after a dozen or so pages, I can't seem to make myself go back and edit them just because they lack any sort of inherent theme. That, and this blog was created for the sole purpose of detailing the very specific world of "Ailsglyph", which is something I haven't written about in quite awhile, so maybe I should just go back to writing short stories about that world and the people who inhabit it.

So what is Ailsglyph? Well, in short, Ailsglyph is a city with no discernible leadership, Ailsglyph is centered around a giant library that is considered by the inhabitants of the "Known World" to be the birthplace of all modern mythology. The books there are written in many different tongues, and there's so many books about just about anything you can think of that scholars tend to spend their entire lives there trying to understand the secrets of the library.

Part of the library's mystique is that it is generally known knowledge that the world has only existed for about five hundred years. Not all of the books are dated, but most are, and none go further back than that. The earliest recorded event found was when the kings of Ailsglyph and Aulfore made a truce with each other that ended whatever dark ages that preceded it, though no one alive today knows what life was like before this event. It was in celebration of this even that the library was constructed, a calendar system was invented, and books from all the world came to Ailsglyph to populate the new massive library.

Library aside, Ailsglyph is broken up into over 20 distinct districts, though many districts overlap. Each district has it's own style of self-management, and the interactions between the people of power over any of these districts comprise the politics of the city. The city is a bit unique in that the surrounding rural areas tend to reside the most eccentric, downright crazy people in the Known World. While some of their stories are so surreal that they border on insanity and the impossible, even well respected and trusted people tend to have wild stories of their own when they visit these areas. It's assumed that the local wildlife in that area tend to have lots of hallucinogenic plants, and those living in symbiosis with the wild tend to have their own unique worldview. Surprisingly, for bordering such a large city, the people who live here aren't very well known, and tend to keep to themselves.

The Known World is the universally accepted name for the world as they know it, because everyone is quite aware that there is an "unknown world", and the names given to the collective world vary radically depending on belief system. The Known World is well chartered, as the border consists of a deep fog that no one dares to venture further in lest they disappear forever.

There are four major kingdoms: Ailsglyph, Aulfore, Koliego, and Dourian. Aulfore is the largest and most powerful empire and has a tendency towards conquest, but due to the alliance with Ailsglyph and the nature behind the alliance, they remain on friendly terms today. Ailsglyph as a kingdom don't tend to think of themselves as land-owners, so much as a people with a variance of an intellectual perspective on the world. Their 'towns' tend to be districts in other cities, or farming and trading outposts scattered across the roads. A lot of Ailsglyph tribes are nomadic, and most tend to stay inside the forests.

Dourian and Aulfore were never major enemies, but Aulfore did tend to create lots of brigand groups who found Dourian cities easier targets than others. Because of this, Dourian's legacy was cut short, and now consists almost entirely of ruins and towns suffering from poverty. Dourian cities are the most abundant across the Known World, and some cities are more organized than others, but Dourian has long lost any semblance of central leadership, and even now, many factions are trying to gain power to become a mighty kingdom again.

As for Koliego... well, they stick to themselves mostly, given the nature of the Known World's layout, they aren't an easily invaded nation. They have some of the most disciplined and trained warriors in the Known World, but probably the least experienced when it comes to veteran experience, since no one cares much to take their territory. Their land isn't very fertile, most of it is desert actually, and the people tend to value artistic qualities than material wealth. As such, they are not part of the global conflict on a major scale.

Anyway, the point of Ailsglyph isn't to detail some fantasy epic, it's actually a meditation on belief systems, and the premise actually originated from a discussion on how dumb magic can be when it comes to facilitating a coherent plot-line.

So why do I want to write a bunch of short stories explaining this fantasy land? Well, I have a larger story in mind, but the origin of Ailsglyph is pretty important in understanding the central premise of the story. Also, I'll admit, there's hundreds of opportunities for pulp fiction in a setting like this that could lend a hand in me re-gaining my creative strength, but really... I just want to create a foundation for an imagined world that other people can be a part of so that I can more easily play my little mind games on them.

The girl is the world

The girl is the world... a part of me that wants, that desires... it manifests itself in people, in objects or emotions. You take these little pieces of yourself and scatter them through everything you've ever known in your life, and when you leave, those pieces of yourself become memories. And memories come back to haunt you...

I could be doing a lot with my life right now, but the motivation just isn't there. I'm too busy trying to deal with my own emotions and getting frustrated that I can't get the upper hand. It's what I deserve though, it's my own fault I allowed the things I can't understand to determine my own well-being... implying I ever had control over my own life and desires in the first place, but now here I am, unsatisfied with my situation, knowing that I can't really *do* anything without moving on, and... well, doing stuff. Catch 22 right there.

Forgive these next few paragraphs, they're going to feel a little bit like a rant, but I feel it's important I lay down my train of thought... people want power. Not exactly power, but there's no word for the concept I'm trying to convey to my knowledge. People want the ability to move on, the power to remove their obstacles so they can return to their calm glide. Every negative emotion I've ever known was due to a realization of an obstacle, and the more I realize that I've hit the same obstacle over and over again, the worse the feeling becomes. The worst of it becomes so painful that it feels like a physical thing, churning inside your chest, trying to burst out, or rather eat you from the inside out.

But power... capacity... growth... there must be a proper identifier here, I refuse to believe my thoughts on this matter are yet another dead end that will destroy me like all the others. What is this desire... this... realization of empowerment, this... dancing muse playing to our heart's own violin... it must be something that can be realized. How can I feed something that I can't even conceptualize properly? Is that why it always dies?

Is it the mother of inspiration? The child of novelty? Do I want so badly to draw out my situation that my shadow chains and frees it as it pleases? How can some be so brilliant and others so withdrawn? How are some people so in tune with this dream-like apparition? Have you ever seen someone transcend their situation so fluently without the aid of this creative maestro?

It's like she's always there, flashing in the corner of my eye, reminding me that I'm not alone, that I have a part to play... reminding me that I'm just floating down this river of time, that trying to float upstream is futile, and swimming downstream will only end you more quickly... all she really wants you to do is stay afloat, with dignity and composure.

There's no language to define her nor her behavior... only vague artistic notions can even hope to give others a glimpse of it, and no matter how clever the wordplay, the attempt seems folly. But as I sit here trying to make something out of seemingly nothing, should I shy away from the obstacle that brought me to this place, or face it head on? Somehow the very question turns the obstacle into a friendly face, a familiar companion on your road throughout the unknown... Is this how it was meant to be? Is this the true nature of the enemy? Is knowing the enemy the only way to truly know yourself?

I'm tired of the struggle but I'm not tired of the fight... Somehow, some way, I must let composure flow over me once again, instead of fighting my demons, I must learn to dance with them. Instead of sitting here in apathetic disquiet, I must venture forward by taking a deep breath and putting one leg in front of the other.

Transcending Science

The universe is a system... the universe as we know it anyway. The universe may actually be something quite unlike how we understand it, and I'm always interested in seeing other people's point of view on how we might have it all wrong, but... honestly, it's been a long time since I've heard a coherent, original explanation about it all. It would seem like you're either a complete realist who doesn't believe anything about the world unless it's been clarified in a peer-reviewed science journal, or you fancy yourself a spiritualist that spends most their time picking and choosing religious traits you like and filling in the cracks formed by nosy skeptics.

Either way, both sides don't seem all that open-minded the way they go about discussing the mysteries of life. I've always been pretty quiet on the issue, mostly because the internet could really do without another pointless religious argument, but I think I'll at least attempt to throw a wrench in the cog of the internet hate machine by trying to find a third argument.

See... the way I see it, people aren't necessarily after truth. I think what people are really trying to do is to create a belief system so they can make sense of the world. Some choose religion, some choose science, some live by rationalism, others by empiricism. But what they all have in common is that they set down some ground rules for what constitutes truth, without any real consideration of what truth even means. Science made some major headway into solving the universal predicament of what to agree on by simply declaring observations based on repeatable experiences. Seeing is believing, as it were, and thus, if spinning makes you dizzy, clearly it must be so.

But I'll take it one step further... what exactly is happening that makes observation possible? It's a byproduct of consciousness, of course. It's basically the thing that happens when a system collects enough information to analyze a declaration in the form of an observation. Even further, that observation only makes sense in the realm of language, in which the rules of logic and mathematics can apply, which might I add are also systems in and of themselves, granted very sophisticated ones.

Now while an argument could theoretically be made that analyzing information doesn't necessarily filter for truth, I definitely don't want to talk shit about how amazing the brain is when it comes to these kinds of tasks. I'm just noting that information is being processed before the notion of truth is even a tangible concept. I doubt the universe even cared about what was true or not before we came along. For all we know, physics lived a carefree and reckless life before we came along and made sense of it.

The way I see it... ever since our very first complete thought, we've been figuring out a puzzle. If something didn't make sense, our curiosity would force us to deal with it, even if it involved tagging it with a name and throwing it in a folder in our brain titled "mysteries of the universe", never to be thought of again. The older we get, the more accustomed we become to organizing information in such a way that we are intimidated by the notion of a complete re-structuring of our brain. It's one thing to find out that a tomato is no longer a vegetable, it's another thing completely if the world turned out to be round instead of flat. Just imagine how you'd feel if you found out your belief system was actually the complete opposite of true, how would you deal with re-structuring that to make sense of the world again? Where would you even start?

But, perhaps truth as a concept is elusive by it's very nature. Perhaps there's no set way the universe actually operates, perhaps the rules change as the universe expands, perhaps the universe is a collective dream in which we all decide what the rules are, perhaps only you exist and the world is a manifestation you made up to make sense of your own personality and inner struggles, or perhaps a lot of atoms exist and magnetism is the ruling force of all interactions forever incomprehensible by the human mind because of the nature of chaos theory.

And you know what? Maybe it doesn't matter. I think regardless of what the truth actually is, if there's a truth to begin with, we're all going to pick the one we like the most anyway. Because in the end, it doesn't matter what truth is to the subjective experience. People existed just fine before they knew anything about astronomy and physics, hell, they still do. It could even be defeatist to attempt to corral everyone together into a single belief system, just think of all the alternative paradigms we'd miss out on! I mean... take for example, somebody who believes the world has only existed for a hundred years. You could tire yourself out trying to explain to him how advanced civilizations and cultures could have formed so comprehensively in such a short amount of time, or you could think about the implications of such a specific worldview. If he actually created a robust and logical internal worldview, he'd probably be filled to the brim with novel ideas, as crazy as most of them would sound, but the profundity levels would be off the chart.

However, I digress... I honestly believe we'd rather attempt to find an ultimate truth because our experiences - the realization of 'truth' - is what fuels our own levels of insight. If something seems to be true, even if it later turns out to be false, we can't deny that feeling that our world opened up a little bit more, offering all sorts of new possibilities. I mean, think about games, or movies, or virtually any form of fiction. Sometimes they offer us things we're more willing to accept and believe in because there's something about their internal system we find attractive. Is it any wonder that people end up in all sorts of different religions and belief systems?

In many ways, any sort of belief system, even one deeply rooted in logical thinking and sound reasoning is much like a prison system. How easy is it, even for the most brilliant of us, to feel disheartened because we feel like our own worldviews had led us to cell, inherently limiting us to never truly break free? I know I've personally felt the weight of the world crush down on me as my childhood aspirations and idealistic notions about the universe got reduced to scientific concepts. Each time I made sense of the world, I felt a rush of euphoria as I picked up on the implications, only to be followed by a sense of dread as my mind slowly reduced the revelation to simply yet another mind numbing factoid. How filled with delight and imagination when I first pondered the mere insignificance of Earth in relation to the trillions of galaxies in the known universe, only to later ponder the same thought with nothing more but a sense of apathy.

And just like a prison system, in order to break out of it, you first have to understand what a prison system truly is. I don't want to take this metaphor too far, but think about it, what exactly *is* a prison system? A bunch of walls, some security systems, you got your prison guards and of course the inmates. You have whatever tools disposable to you within the prison, and you have the combined experiences and worldviews of all the guards and inmates inside the prison system. If no combination of those experiences and tools lead you to a solution on how to break out of the system, then you have to re-think the system, turn it into abstractions until you can reform the picture differently, then perhaps you can find a way to break free.

Anyway, I'm starting to feel a bit cheesy here, but just to go full circle... next time you find yourself engaged in a science vs religion debate, I urge you to just stop for a second and analyze the nature of the conflict... you might be able to dig a little bit deeper and satisfy everyone. I mean, we're just trying to make sense of things, right?

Too Cool for School

Hi there, long time, blah blah, let's get to it shall we.

So I've been to school many times. I never seem to last very long there, eventually I get bored of it and drop out, telling myself I'll come back to it again once I got my shit figured out. However something happened to me this month... I realized I didn't want to go back, not even out of guilt, or to satisfy some societal pressure that I felt was looming over me. I simply didn't want to go because I felt... over it.

Now let me specify that a little bit, I'm not dissing on school, though I do believe it's slowly becoming an outdated system, and I'm very much excited for when the school system gets it's act together and integrates itself with the Information Age, but for all intents and purposes, school is great. It has tons of fields sure to satisfy anyone's interest, it allows you to network and meet people that share the same interests as you, and most of them have tons of equipment, services, and resources that you can't really get anywhere else.

That said, schools are great, it's just the classes... the classes are completely irrelevant. I don't think I've ever even once thought to myself that I learned more in a lecture than I could have looking it up on the internet or reading through a textbook. Not once. I'm an internet baby, I have trained my entire life how to find information I want and finding enough information to satiate my curiosity. The only thing I really wanted out of school was perhaps the discipline and focus needed to truly become a specialist in a relevant field so that someone out there would pick you out of the crowd with the respect and confidence that you're qualified to get the job done.

But... after my last revelation, I found out that I don't necessarily care if anyone thinks I'm qualified. I really only care if *I* think I'm qualified. I don't necessarily care about making a lot of money, or fitting into an economical niche, or being labeled as a 'go to' guy for a specific set of skills and knowledge base. In fact, I dream about the day that money is re-conceptualized and the economy enters a state of rapid change and becomes indiscernible. I dream of a world where everyone knows a little bit about everything and no one ever has to be forced into a dead-end job ever again.

But that's the idealistic side of me talking. On the realistic side of things... I feel completely comfortable in my ability to survive in this world. I'm comfortable enough that I can make these observations and play around with them. I can take the time out of a day to sit back and see if I can find something novel in the world and see if there's more to that new perspective.

So with that said... I'm going to try to spend my time learning new skills so that I can offer this little internet of ours something special. Since this blog is already here, I'm just gonna use it. Who cares, right? :P