Tag Archive | "Eric Ashley"

Pass the Grog

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I am always forgetting that I did things which are relevant to what I am doing; maybe it is because a statement like that makes little sense anyway.

In this case, I spent a long time filling out a questionnaire for a bio page about, of all people, me, for a French website, GROG.  I do not know the meaning of the anagram, but expect it is in French.  Yesterday I reviewed an English version of the completed bio, which the administrator hopes to have posted (in French) by sometime next week.

I also forwarded the questionnaire to someone on our staff who ought to be included, although I think there are probably a few more people to whom I ought to forward it.  One about whom I have already asked is Eric “Tadeusz” “World-a-Week” Ashley, but my e-mail software does not seem to be able to find his e-mail address.  Eric, if you drop me a note I’ll send this to you–from what they say, your self-published efforts qualify you for inclusion in their board.

So if we have any French participants here, let me know how it reads in French.

–M. J. Young

A Singular Accomplishment

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Sometime last night, after I had finished everything here, something came into my mind and I said to myself, “Oh, right, I did that, too, but didn’t include it in the blog.”

Looking up at the notes on my monitor, I don’t see what “that” was, and now I’m trying to remember.

I remembered. It’s not that big a deal.

Eric Ashley elsewhere speaks much of Verner Vinge and what is called “the singularity”; in fact, his Gaming Outpost blog (which I have cited on at least one occasion) is (was?) entitled Singularity’s End. I was aware that this was connected to the word of someone named Verner Vinge, whose name was unfamiliar to me.

It is one of the problems of aging that one gets isolated from the active intellectual community unless one either works within it or makes an effort to stay connected. Thus I find myself very familiar with materials known through the early seventies when I was in school, and with major trends which were covered in Omni during its brief life in the early eighties, but that much of what has followed, if it is outside the areas of my primary foci, is outside my familiarity. My knowledge is very spotty on current information in many areas. It is to some degree the price of being a generalist–that I am learning less and less about more and more, and one day will know nothing about everything. It is to some degree the price of Toffler’s Future Shock (see? Familiarity with older work), that information is expanding faster than anyone, even someone devoted to it, can pace. Thus Vinge’s work is apparently significant throughout the science and science fiction worlds, but unknown to me.

During my hiatus at the end of this week, that particular failing in my background has been mended. A few weeks ago, Grey Vanaman (usually mentioned here in connection with musical equipment, but who also brings his biblical, theological, spiritual, and philosophical questions to me) stumbled upon Vinge’s seminal article, and forwarded it to me, which I printed and placed with my current reading. During the down time I took a break from The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis (a good but slow book from a slower time, laced with many quirks of its age and situation but still having much value) to read this article. It turns out that the singularity is something with which I’d had some familiarity prior to Vinge’s work, but not by that name; it concerns the development of what I was taught to call UIMs (Ultra Intelligent Machines), artificial intelligence smarter than human intelligence, along with related technologies which might (high probability might) bring us to a time when ordinary (that is, natural, even if exceptional) humans are no longer the smartest minds in our world. One reasonable conclusion from this is that humans will no longer be the designers, inventors, developers, or creators of our world. Vinge (citing previous authors) recognizes this as what might be termed an evolutionary turning point for the world, a moment of change so drastic that it is almost beyond our ability to imagine that which follows it.

None of the concepts were new to me, but they were well organized, clearly expressed, and persuasively defended. It was mostly the association of these diverse concepts under the one name that had escaped my attention.

So now I know; and so do you.

–M. J. Young

Almost Nothing, Much

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After I posted yesterday’s Blogless Lepolt entry, I decided to finish the page of materials by Eric Ashley–not that I used many of his links, but that I got him linked. I posted the new pages, so if you visit the Multiverser support site you will find the links to the unofficial and fan support materials (mine is “unofficial” and his is “fan”, which is a distinction I could clarify were it necessary). It really did not take much time to finish up his part, once I opened the thread and started following the links; however, uploading the two new and one revised pages adds a great deal of support material to the web site, because of all that is linked.

There is much that I did not link. I was looking for materials that were either ready for play (with mechanics included) or were solid general contributions. I found his placeholder worlds book (which I have not read, mea culpa) and his address on quick world creation (which I read long ago and am now re-reading in my spare moments), but otherwise dropped general links to his games, blogs, and articles. As with my own page, I do not consider this brief collection either exhaustive or finished, but the beginning of a list of the more useful contributions of which our referees ought to be aware.

I also need to talk to some of our people in-house about providing more materials.

–M. J. Young

Incomplete Unofficial Support

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I was a bit surprised to have a bit of extra time last night, so I tackled the new project I mentioned yesterday, creating links pages for unofficial Multiverser support. I’ve only actually done my own, and it is a paltry beginning which includes links to the Martial Arts site in its new location, Intuition and Surprise, I’m Not a Lawyer, but I Play One in a Game, the three-part Law and Enforcement in Imaginary Realms series, and the three-part Theory 101 series. There are also links to Gaming Outpost (for the Game Ideas Unlimited series), and to the Chaplain’s Corner of the Christian Gamers Guild (for the Faith and Gaming series), but part of me says I really need to go through all those articles, re-index them, and select the cream of the crop for Multiverser support. It’s a lot of work, but I’ll figure it out eventually.

In that connection, I also already put a link on the file copy of the main support page to an as yet non-existent (O.K., existent but not having correct content) page of links to Eric “Tadeusz” “World-a-Week” Ashley’s support materials, which I consider a valuable contribution to the Multiverser corpus. I need to scrape together enough time to tackle those links, which probably will not happen today (it might, though), so I can upload the entire package.

I got an early start today thanks to the cat. I think she was looking for a new hiding place for her kittens and decided to look behind my night table. I was disturbed by the sound of her rooting around back there, and looked at the clock–which was blank, because it had no power. That can be any of several problems, of course, so potential panic arose within me, and I jumped out of bed to determine the nature of the problem. It turned out to be the least problematic problem–the cat had unplugged everything from the outlet–but by the time I’d visited the bathroom and returned, I figured I was awake. Since Tuesday has my heaviest online workload, I figured I might as well stay awake and get started.

So, I’m started.

–M. J. Young

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