That Which Is Not To Be Named.
Or described. Or empictured, or hinted at, or invoked in any way: except for this brief and unenlightening announcement, which has been approved from upstairs.
I’m working on a project with Capcom Vancouver.
It’s currently a Schröedinger’s Cat: not alive, not dead, or maybe both. The important thing right now is to not pop the lid and look inside, since the waveform isn’t quite ready to collapse just yet. We’re still in early development; there’s no guarantee an actual game will emerge at the end of the process. But I will say this much: of the three game gigs I’ve been involved with to date, this is the one that excites me the most. These people are sharp, we share a common perspective on the role of science in our fiction, and — based on certain entrails and auguries I am also not allowed to talk about — I am permitting myself the merest smidgen of hope.
Also I control the weather. How else can you explain the fact that the moment I go to Vancouver the temperatures there drop from their usual seasonal mid-twenties down to single-digits and goddamn snow flurries, while the city I left behind — which is normally locked in a deep-freeze this time of year — basks in 30-plus Humidex? How else to explain the sudden return to seasonal west-coast warmth on the very day I leave Vancouver, coincident with Toronto dropping back down to subfreezing norms upon my return?
Well, maybe I don’t exactly control the weather. But if not, I’ve certainly pissed off something that does.
Welcome back, and congrats on the Thing That Might Be.
(Gotta put those weather requests up in advance, buddy. As a goddess, I can only do so much.)
Sorry to tell you but the japanese overlords have a history of shutting down non-japan-capcom projects. Wish you all the best tho.
Cool! Hopefully it gets made. If not, feel free to “accidentally” leak any cool ideas you may have had 😛
Peter, I’m worried about this project. I know you probably went in and pitched a version of Megaman that attempts to teach the audience that intentionality is an illusion and that our conscious mind is but an executive summary after the fact . . . by giving the player only illusory control over Megaman. He jumps, he shoots, he . . . well, that’s about it, I guess . . . and the player doesn’t control any of it, but is nevertheless dead certain that he or she was in the driver’s seat. Look, it’s an interesting idea, but I think Bioware already made a self-playing game. They called it Dragon Age, or something similar.
Off topic, but would you wish to follow James Cameron’s example and descend to the bottom of the sea?
Amazing accomplishment! But *much* better him than me.
Oh yes. I was designing diving bells out of oil drums and inflatable underwater habitats out of green garbage bags turned upside-down, from the age of eight. Living on the prairies.
A resident evil game with your touch would go down well.
edit: oh nice, an edit function for comments, must see about installing it on my site
I don’t know if this is useful data at this point, but I’m putting money on my Peter Watts shrine and praying for this project to become commercially available.
Wait, you’re…female ? (huh, perhaps the worst question to ask in the morning, ;))
I always imagined you as a tall large man, not unlike Lore Sjöberg
I am informed that my current (thankfully) temporary habitat is now listed among the three worst on Earth for pollen and other flora-related allergens. It’s like hitting yourself with a hammer…it will, one assumes, feel so much better when I stop.
As for weather, average of 1/3 days have a tornado warning as well. Have yet to be caught out in one *here* though.
(Goddam terraforming aliens… *snort*).
@Peter Watts, who wrote in-part: Well, maybe I don’t exactly control the weather. But if not, I’ve certainly pissed off something that does.
Maybe it thinks that since you come from a place with cold weather, you’d like cold weather wherever you’re going for a visit. Makes sure you have what it thinks you like. Godlike powers but definitely not omniscient enough to guess that you might actually like a break from the cold. Thus, it’s not pissed off at you, but you need to tell it what you’d prefer otherwise it has to guess. (And yes, this does sound a lot like advising you to pray before scheduling vacations.)
PS Good luck with the Schrodinger Cat, just remember that you have to buy it that special cat food that comes in a Klein Bottle…
Oh, come on, just admit it… you’re making a Siri Keeton video game. Gamers can finally feel the thrill of rotating informational topologies!
Heh heh heh. Sjöberg. You flatterer.
As a minor deity, I have many aspects, and my weather aspect is female. My alcohol aspect is male, but if you pray to me for rain for your wine grape harvest, hermaphodite, because you got weather and booze.
See, if you actually do any creating in your deity work, you needs must be pan-genderal. The current Judeo-Christian dogma ignores this at their own peril. I have to say, though, I am totally appeased if I am pictured as Lore Sjöberg.
While we’re assigning genders to anthropomorphized uber-sprits (usually, I prefer either the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the ever-popular Giant Purple Space Squid), I have to admit that it is hard to imagine Ostara as a male. Ostara, of course, being a fairly obscure and perhaps not actually traditional purportedly NW-European goddess of springtime, renewal, and of course fertility. Although she’s associated to the Bunny, nobody’s quite sure if the bunny is male or female. Her festival is observed on the weekend of the first full moon following the vernal equinox. Offerings of chocolate are well-received.
Hljóðlegur, I like the way you use the word “current” in that remark about Judeo-Christian dogma. IIRC originally Astarte/Astoroth was associated to the Judeo-Christian patriarchal deity, but evidently they had a falling out among the priesthood, with a particularly nasty contested divorce which had the priests commanding the troops with instructions such as “let not one stone remain stood upon another”. Yet though the ruins might have been scattered, there was not successful removal from literature or “obliteration”. It seems that we still see a certain non-male deity type figure in Scripture, Proverbs 8 for a good example. Read that as a “current” traditional Judeo-Christian and it’s the wise little maidservant to the omnipotent one. Read it in the context of the probable YHWH/Astarte duality, and it reads like “eh, he’d have never got around to doing it if I hadn’t noodged him, and I had to supervise everything when he did get around to doing it.” 8-D
I thought it amusing that he/she mentioned gender, Dogma, and left out mentioning Kevin Smith and Alanis Morissette. 😉
@Whoever: the reason nobody responded to your observation is because they were so exerted with ROFL that they alarmed their neighbors and had to be rushed to the hospital for extended observation. Hold it, “Silent Bob” produces Alanis as g_d? Maybe that’s why we’re getting all of these earthquakes, freakish weather, and a really amazing Solar Max.
To drift the topic back to SF, I wonder, do the magnetic flux lines of these “solar tornados” have any effect on hydrogen fusion in the visible photosphere, or is that even a place that stellar fusion occurs? I ask this because, I think that some MHD variant of those, is hoped to provide an alternative engineering and research line of inquiry in the search for commercial fusion energy production, the other alternative “preferred” line of inquiry being inertial confinement with laser implosion ignition.
As far as I know, fusion takes place in the core of the sun. The photons need about a million years to reach the surface, from Gamma rays degraded to lower energy.
Are you addressing Stellarators, the Wendelstein project, e.g.?
@ Andrea_A, who wrote in-part: Are you addressing Stellarators, the Wendelstein project, e.g.?
You know, I do believe I was. I have to say, it has been a very long time since I heard that word, “Stellerator”. Near to me is a Smithsonian Museum, and it had a “stellerator” from maybe 1963 or so. It was about 10 feet long. 😉 I suppose that some people might think “if at first you don’t succeed, maybe it’s because you were trying it at too small a scale”.
Then again, it may be that the larger the scale, outside of gravity containment as in stars, the less the likelihood of success.
I seem to recall something about rather small “whiskers” of some combination of rare earths — perhaps niobium and tantalum — which could be chilled, and as they returned to room temperature, released sprays of fairly fast neutrons. I also seem to recall — but cannot find to cite here — some discussion to the effect that if you were trying to ignite fusion reactions, it would probably work but it would be very small scale, nothing that would be interesting to an electrical generation corporation.
About the “solar tornados”… well, a natural stellerator? If the main hydrogen-to-helium fusion is taking place in the solar core, one might wonder what could happen with heavier elements (especially magnetic ones) if those “solar tornados” impart enough compression, or speed of collisions, for small particles. Probably someone is doing a paper but I don’t know the preferred terminology and cannot properly devise an appropriate set of search strings to google.