I’ve been reading Metaplanetary by Tony Daniels the past week or so. It’s an interesting book – set in a future where the inner Solar System is linked by a series of interplanetary travel tubes, pretty much everything is a computational substrate, people have a data portion to their personality, there are spaceship people hanging out in the Oort cloud, and so on and so forth.

Late in the book, one of those ship-people states that the war going on throughout the book is a conflict between people who want to be individuals, and people who want to be part of a vast group-mind. It’s pretty clear what side the author is on; the main viewpoint character of the group-mind side is a power-mad dictator who wants to be the one in control of said group-mind, and has a BDSM-flavored sex scene.

The massive group mind is something that’s been hanging around SF for a while. I think the first time I really encountered it was in Swanwick’s “Vacuum Flowers“, where the whole of the Earth is inhabited by one giant hive-mind. Most people are probably familiar with Star Trek’s Borg.

And it got me to thinking. Group minds are, as far as I can think, inevitably depicted as being somewhat acquisitive and malign. At best, they’re large and alien, and will sweep you up into them without really thinking about it. They make a good boogeyman for modern SF.

They make such a good boogeyman that I kinda feel like they will never be a problem in reality. My instincts based on growing up reading a lot of SF from the 1960s, then living into the 2010s, as well as the occasional glimpse at futurism from the turn of the last century, tell me that something that seems this scary is going to be superseded by more subtle ramifications of the technologies that never quite manage to enable it.

But then again, I’m also midway through a story that involves a couple of group minds, one of which I’m trying to depict as anything but acquisitive and uncaring, despite my viewpoint character really not wanting anything to do with them.

…I feel like I had a point I wanted to make with this line of thought, but it’s slipped out of my mind somewhere along the way. I can’t see where I was aiming beyond “SF is not about predicting the future, it’s just about playing what-if and telling an entertaining story.”

Reasons why my Skyrim character is completely insane:

• She tends to stare fixedly in a random direction when talking to people, instead of looking at them.
• She wanders through the heart of a snowstorm, or into the deepest darkest dungeon, wearing nothing but a cheap white dress. No armor, no shoes. Combine that with the big black smears of war paint around her eyes and she totally has the “broken waif” look down pat.
• She follows foxes. Sometimes they lead her interesting places. Sometimes they just get her more lost. None of them have turned out to actually be her ex, but she keeps on hoping.

Reasons why she is the sanest person in all of Skyrim:

• She's kind of creeped out by this whole “Dragonborn” thing. Especially the way every important event in the world seems to wait for her to be around. All she wants to do is acquire a lot of treasure, and if she runs into a dragon, steal some things from its hoard, and maybe fuck the dragon if they're cute.
• Her kill count: eight humans (all in the intro, before I got the hang of sneaking), a handful of wild animals that attacked her, and a bunch of undead roaming the various tombs she's defiled, both for plot reasons and because she doesn't have to think about how crazy this world is when she's sneaking around a dungeon.

Her main close-up weapon is a magic dagger named after the one dragon she let the world railroad her into killing. Lately she's taken to saying thank you to it after killing wolves/bears/giant rats/etc that attack her.

Ostensibly she is Absinthe from me and Nick's comic of the same name, somehow dropped into this serious D&D world and turned into a human. This whole setup amuses me.

(I'm playing on easy, as a thief build; I've adapted the personal disciplines of “no killing” and “no armor”, and will totally scum save games so that all pickpocket attempts succeed. Also I'll always follow foxes if one runs across my path. If I'm not doing a dungeon with a companion clomping around next to me and killing everything in sight, I will probably try for zero kills, though that would be a lot easier if I could throw distractions or douse lights… the amount of fun I'm having playing this way suggests that if Thief 4 comes out on the 360 and has a third-person mode, I will be buying that.)

(Also if I was handed a video game director position right now I would totally make a 3rd-person stealth game that stars a lady and seriously rewards you for not killing.)

Today I started working on the ad for Further Confusion 2014. I did the photo shoot involved and the Photoshopping, then did a rough layout in AI. I’m not sure if I’ll be drawing the elements I need before I go to bed tonight; I’d kinda like to have at least a first draft before then.

After that, I went on out to Whole Foods to replenish my supply of granola. I’ve been eating some in the morning for a few years and I know I’m cranky when I run out. I was delighted to find that I could go out in a long-sleeved dress and no coat – at last, spring is starting to grace Seattle with its presence! Hooray!

On the way back I detoured past the little cat adoption place nearby and looked in the window. I took my bag home – I had some milk and yogurt in there too that needed to go in the fridge – then went back and went in to visit some of the cats. Sadly the one who’d come to the window and given me a “You are mine” look when I first passed by the place a few weeks ago was gone; he’s at the larger Lynnwood location getting some special care because he’s been having a bit of bladder trouble.

I said hello to about a half dozen of the cats the folks at the shelter thought were a good match for what I told them about my life. There were a few who were in that selection who were simply Not In The Mood For Socializing, so I didn’t make anything like final decisions yet. And I’ll have to bring Nick along with me a couple times as I start zeroing in on a few possibilities to make sure whatever cat I get doesn’t hate him on sight; Nick visits pretty much every week, and is probably who’ll cat-sit when I’m away for a convention, so it’s pretty crucial that any cat I get be cool with him.

Meanwhile, my side is definitely on the mend. It’s still not fully healed but I can actually bend my torso around with only a little bit of pain. Situps and lying on my front aren’t happening yet, but they feel less implausible than they did Monday night when I’d just sprained it.