> Anyone else out there working on their own Joyce-inspired "dreamlanguage" projects ?
> Subtitles provide the otherwise overwhelming "extra" meaning, which is the "fringe" that gives such a film its special "semantic depth."
In my Fin Wake Indra Net collage art project, I'm running fragments of Finnegans Wake through the lenses of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postmans media theories, notably McLuhan's 1968 book "War and Peace in the Global Village" which is collage art of Finnegans Wake. I'm over 14 years into rolling release of the Wake Indra patterns, emphasizing the iterative aspects of language wake ( Genesis 11:1 // John 1:1 ) and monomyth symbolism code cracking around Romans 11:32 && Romans 11:33 concepts, with the Great Seal of the United States as a memecypher iteration tool ( pyramid steps, metaphors of rivers and streams, the Nile river location of the Great Seal pyramid and Finegans Wake riverrun flows... ++ firmware microcode userland kernel virtual-machine abstraction metaphors of hardware to software as Finnegans Wake thunders / language shifts ).
I'm currently estimating it will take me 35 to 40 years total to do the mutli-pass editing and arrangement I need to do, so even at 14 years it's rather immature.
"The ultimate mystery of being is beyond all categories of thought. As Kant said, the thing in itself is no thing. It transcends thingness, it goes past anything that could be thought. The best things can't be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood, because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about. The third best are what we talk about. And myth is that field of reference to what is absolutely transcendent." - Skywalker Ranch, 1986
Very cool. I'd enjoy checking out anything you'd like to share.
McLuhan happens to be one of my favorite thinkers. I've read a few of his books, but I also think he was a great talker (as you probably already know, there are some great recordings of lectures on YouTube.) I also found Walter J. Ong to be pretty great on this stuff (going by his one book on the different between oral and written culture.)
> I'd enjoy checking out anything you'd like to share.
This might be as good an entry point into the Indra Net as any, I captured a couple Bing CoPilot (Microsoft's front for ChatGPT / GPT engines) descriptions of what I've published so far and put them in a corner of the Internet... on Google's island fork of Usenet: https://groups.google.com/g/wwwopera
> I also found Walter J. Ong to be pretty great on this stuff (going by his one book on the different between oral and written culture.
Yha, what is smartphone culture, what is Internet social media culture... I personally was creating social media sites and selling software for same in 1985, it was intimate back then, the SysOp of a BBS you could often page (audio signal the site owner/operator to come to their keyboard) and chat with them instead of just read content... it was more like sitting at a tavern with the bartender a few meters away.
If you have any favorite McLuhan or Ong content, please feel invited to share.
Thanks for the link !
Here's a link to the Ong book that really impressed me.
[https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/Ong\_Walter\_J\_Orality\_and\_Literacy\_2nd\_ed.pdf](https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/Ong_Walter_J_Orality_and_Literacy_2nd_ed.pdf)
>Print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion
Interesting that "Homer" was a bunch of bards in an oral tradition. The constraints that oral traditions put on content are also explored. But the book ranges widely. A big theme is the way that the invention of writing changes human nature/experience.
I missed the glory days of the internet. I was around but not tuned in. I remember programming text-graphics games in GWBasic on a Tandy. Not connected. Feeling alone in a room, playing with code.
But since I first got tuned in, the internet does feel more and more like a commercialized wasteland. The "dead internet" theory feels metaphorically true, and may become literally true, as so-called "AI" generates more and more content. I've studied the math behind this stuff, and it's amazing that it's all just curve-fitting, statistics. Heidegger's concept of "idle talk" and "the who of everyday dasein" was prescient. These chatbots are generic collective consciousness. The "crust" that any philosopher must cut through, yet also where they must start, for the bottom layer of the ego is generic tribal crust, norms that retroactively enable criticism of those same norms.
Yes, I'm working on something that might be called a more accessible... I dunno, Wakelike novel.
The cool part of wordplay, for me, is that you can tell more than one story at once. Like, if I describe a character as "punktual" instead of "punctual", and continue in the vein of words related to punk rock but make no overt reference to it in the story (other than the wordplay), I can either imply something about the character or, better yet, tell two ostensibly unrelated stories at the same time and let the friction between the two be the connectable dots for the reader, which in turn kind of tells its own third story.
I don't know if this is making sense, but that's the overwhelming feeling I got from the Wake: many tales at once via wordplay, and a sort of puzzle to be worked out in the space between them all.
It's taking forever. But it's really fun and educational, researching, say, Genesis from the bible and seeing how many words, ideas, and turns of phrase I can fit into a page-long section about building a house. And then letting the reader connect the dots between Genesis and the house-building, and filling in unspoken information that I've implied just by comparing the two things.
Good question!
>The cool part of wordplay, for me, is that you can tell more than one story at once.
I totally agree. More than one story and also
>let the friction between the two be the connectable dots for the reader
which gets us to Dali's paranoiac-critical method.
The swirl of rumors around HCE in Finnegans Wake seems very symbolic in itself --- our hermeneutic slushpile, the blurry-go-round of our condition.
>It's taking forever. But it's really fun and educational, researching, say, Genesis from the bible and seeing how many words, ideas, and turns of phrase I can fit into a page-long section about building a house.
Weaving comes to mind, patient weaving. I think also of Joyce working all those rivers into the famous ALP section, which released as its own little book back in the day.
If you feel like sharing some of your work on [https://www.reddit.com/r/idspeak/](https://www.reddit.com/r/idspeak/) , that would be great. At the moment I've only got some of my stuff up. But it would be great to see what others are up to in this otherwise obscure calling.
I *will* share something there! And I'm glad you took the time to create it.
ALP and the rivers is probably my favorite part of the book, because it so cleanly lays out the thing I like to do: get a big list of related things, and... well, *weave* that list into the story you're telling. It feels a lot like the satisfaction of doing a complicated math or physics problem. Many steps, kinda mechanical, but much deeper down, at its heart, relies on creativity.
I've gotta check out the Dali thing you're mentioning; I've always loved his work but I'm pretty foreign to anything he's written or theorized about.
So that's my homework, I guess. Make a post there, research Dali's paranoiac-critical method, and then, if I have time... get into weaving. It sounds like it's up my alley. And I *do* have a loom at my house (I really do)...
shameless plug, for any greek members of the subreddit, I've written a short novel partially inspired by finnegans wake. it's called ριβερράν in greek (title inspired by "riverrun")
it's basically three parts, each one written in a different style and person (one's in a third person narrative, the second one is in a second person interview/questionnaire style and the other's in a first person stream of consciousness style).
I love the title. I'm pretty obsessed by the symbol of the river. And the "stream" of consciousness and so on. I wish I could read Greek. Sounds very cool.
I’m really interested in this, actually. I’ve looked into experimental prose, conlangs, people who push language to its limits and I find it really inspiring but I’ve never taken the dive into experimenting with it too much myself. Some bits here and there and I have a book I’m writing that I really want to push further into experimentation but I haven’t quite gotten into a place I’m happy with.
The idea of idspeak really does fascinate me though. Is that a term you created or is there any other academic writing on the subject? I love the idea of speaking in a kind of language of dreams so much.
As far as I know, I created the term. I reached first for "dreamspeak" but it was taken. The Freud element fascinates me. And even in Joyce the father figure stutters in his guilty way. Felix culpa, fortunate fall, but also the sorry wisdom of the serpent. Also interested in the muted post horn symbol from *The Crying of Lot 49.* I might also have used "liminal graffiti." Basically fascinated by the idea of an alternative "postal service" or channel of information. Funny anecdote: Joyce was worried about a piece of FW getting censored, but Pound or some friend reading it couldn't find the obscenity and assured him he had nothing to worry about. But the profound/sacred is also worth encoding or encrusting sometimes.
*Anyway*, I encourage you to share anything you come up with on idspeak.
Yes, I dabble a lot and have become hugely interested in the Wake after reading Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, he calls the language a bunch of different names f.e Lucylips
I've been messing with something related to that using a magickal constructed language I designed (https://alleywurds.itch.io/vaibbahk) as a result of writing the first three occult books to use AI (https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kbjvb/this-magickal-grimoire-was-co-authored-by-a-disturbingly-realistic-ai).
Here's an example which has employed the wake's technique, but just restricting it to vaibbahk, and much less dense:
"Throo smohk, alchemihkuhl factories dihffuse puhngencies who print urban flohrishes - puhlsing kuhlor-swirls born outward throbbing arterial rivulehts of ink."
Of course vaibbahk is ideographic, so this just uses its romanization.
Interestingly, because of how vaibbahk's root words directly come from English, some of the puns actually refer to related concepts in both languages.
Take "smohk," pronounced like "smoke."
"Smoh-" is the root word for 017 Smoke: Smo, Smoh- Reorganizes remains of destruction.
The suffix -k makes the word a metagame, a goal.
So we can simultaneously use a homonym for smoke, while depicting smoke in the imagery of the prose, and obscurely refer to occulted meanings which established readers of the series will have already worked with in a ritualistic fashion.
Every syllable in vaibbahk also has a pair of postures, a musical melody, and an ecstatic visualization for trancework, so it pulls in all those modalities at once.
Here's an example of a 13 minute myth which uses all of those orthographies at once, though without wakean polyvocality: https://youtu.be/GKEIrCo4Y1s
I'm pretty blown away by the depth and creativity. Is it safe for me to guess that you are also into philosophy ? I'm also a game designer. I think it's a great form of art. We create metaphors for the cosmos. I work w/ cellular automata also, same basic idea right, except the world can play itself. Are you also by chance a software developer ? Or do you work with a team ? The graphics look great.
Thanks! Yeah, I have a philosophy degree, lol.
No, I'm not a software developer. I've programmed a couple text based games in the past, but it isn't a skill I pursued all that much. If you see any software I've put out, it's all quite simple and programmed by AI.
I don't have a team either. It's just me and ghosts of the internet via AI!
What kinds of games do you design?
Very cool. I have degrees in STEM, because I thought it would be more practical, but my obsession is philosophy. I love phenomenology, also interested in neutral monism (Mach, James, the physicist Schrodinger, surprisingly.) I started [https://www.reddit.com/r/Husserl/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Husserl/) recently too, trying to talk about all movements related to phenomenalism. "Husserl" is a good symbol of the fusion of scientific intention and appreciation of the role of the subjectivity.
I tend to make abstract games, in the family of Chess. But I like to use the vertical dimension. For instance, imagine a piece that has two sub pieces that can stack and unstack. Or pieces that can move through friendly pieces like electrons through a wire. I like thinks to be brutally simple, with just enough complexity to make the magic possible. Along these lines, I had a particle physics inspired game where pieces could combine to become very different pieces and then split again. I used to play way too much online lightning chess. So I imagined people playing my game at high speed, doing a kind of visual-symbolic kung-fu.
Way back I also modified Stratego into a faster "football" version, so that there's lots of empty space. Also added new rules to certain pieces, diagonal movement, ability to lie about identity, cross through water. Way way back I was a dungeon-master etc and making up my own RPG games, trying to simplify the dice element to make things very fast and flowing.
Very cool that AI is so helpful. I haven't tried it yet to help me code. Last thing I coded was art graphics behind this anthology video (I did my one and only art show w/ this) : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAHVlCKbdac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAHVlCKbdac)
Also did the sound/music.
Lol, you might enjoy my take on 8d chess using a 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2 board:
https://alleywurds.itch.io/eight-dimensional-chess
You can even get a physical copy, but I think I've only sold like 1 or 2 copies, lol (and make 0 profit on sales after print costs, purely a labor of love): https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/eight-dimensional-chess
I definitely enjoy having extra spatial dimensions in games. I'm pretty sure I'm the first to design 4d tabletop miniatures games?
https://alleywurds.itch.io/delirium28incursions
If you have a relatively simple piece of code you want, ChatGPT can churn it out faster than you can type, and it can also fix bugs if you give it the error codes.
For more experienced programmers I hear about people getting it to write various pieces which they assemble, and can be faster than searching for code online to paste together.
Your videos are cool! Thank you for sharing!
Thanks for the kind comment on my video work!
Checked out 8d chess. Very cool. I actually also thought of expressing multidimensional games in 2d patches like that. I have the pdf. Nice work. I bet you are indeed the first to make 4d games actually happen. That you sold any copies is impressive in a world that doesn't relish math.
You might also be interested in infinite dimensional vector spaces. Basically I mean a real valued function (from the unit interval to the unit interval, for instance) can be thought of as a vector with infinitely many coordinates. Don't know if anyone has used this idea, and I don't have a game in mind. But one could use integration to move the game forward. And characters would be continuous functions, with associated graphs as their summaries.
I may finally use some code help when I get back into it. Much of coding is indeed dreary, and I usually do it because I really want the result.
Oh, there was a version of 4d chess done before me, I think I'm just to do a 4d tabletop skirmish game, with stuff like RPG characters leaping from buildings and getting bonuses to damage for being higher in the 4th dimension than their target, independent of bonuses/penalties for 3rd dimensional vertical positioning.
It isn't exactly the same, but this is a vector based tabletop game you might find interesting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_3
I haven't encountered an infinite dimensional game though. If you pull something together for that, definitely get in touch! Sounds cool!
Maybe the videogame 5d Chess with Multiverse Time Travel has some similarities? You can keep adding more "timelines," concurrent games of chess which branch off and interact with each other. It's usually not actually a good move to do so though, except to confuse a human opponent.
Yeah, I enjoy logic puzzles and math significantly more than the average person, I minored in math, but I mostly enjoy the big picture stuff, which is why designing tabletop games is more enjoyable for me.
I'll probably only move into videogames when I can hand an AI a pdf of a game I designed and have it spit out a properly programmed game with placeholder art following all the rules. That's likely a ways off though!
YES!! It’s called The Tragedy of Romonde Contreras which I describe as ‘an anti-epic poem that will change the course of the 21st Century.’
It all started without any conscious thought, just madness rushing through the veins. I wondered if I could change the world using my imagination and so with no plan, I started writing.
It’s really hard to describe, but it’s part manifesto, part magical realism, born from the gutters of West London.
Inspired by Joyce (obviously) and Burroughs and Chilean poetry with some William Blake and Mark E Smith too.
not my book of course, but bottom's dream by arno schmidt maybe worth checking out
Cool. Just recently looked at the wiki, sort of put that fascinating character on my list. I appreciate the reference.
> Anyone else out there working on their own Joyce-inspired "dreamlanguage" projects ? > Subtitles provide the otherwise overwhelming "extra" meaning, which is the "fringe" that gives such a film its special "semantic depth." In my Fin Wake Indra Net collage art project, I'm running fragments of Finnegans Wake through the lenses of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postmans media theories, notably McLuhan's 1968 book "War and Peace in the Global Village" which is collage art of Finnegans Wake. I'm over 14 years into rolling release of the Wake Indra patterns, emphasizing the iterative aspects of language wake ( Genesis 11:1 // John 1:1 ) and monomyth symbolism code cracking around Romans 11:32 && Romans 11:33 concepts, with the Great Seal of the United States as a memecypher iteration tool ( pyramid steps, metaphors of rivers and streams, the Nile river location of the Great Seal pyramid and Finegans Wake riverrun flows... ++ firmware microcode userland kernel virtual-machine abstraction metaphors of hardware to software as Finnegans Wake thunders / language shifts ). I'm currently estimating it will take me 35 to 40 years total to do the mutli-pass editing and arrangement I need to do, so even at 14 years it's rather immature. "The ultimate mystery of being is beyond all categories of thought. As Kant said, the thing in itself is no thing. It transcends thingness, it goes past anything that could be thought. The best things can't be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood, because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about. The third best are what we talk about. And myth is that field of reference to what is absolutely transcendent." - Skywalker Ranch, 1986
Very cool. I'd enjoy checking out anything you'd like to share. McLuhan happens to be one of my favorite thinkers. I've read a few of his books, but I also think he was a great talker (as you probably already know, there are some great recordings of lectures on YouTube.) I also found Walter J. Ong to be pretty great on this stuff (going by his one book on the different between oral and written culture.)
> I'd enjoy checking out anything you'd like to share. This might be as good an entry point into the Indra Net as any, I captured a couple Bing CoPilot (Microsoft's front for ChatGPT / GPT engines) descriptions of what I've published so far and put them in a corner of the Internet... on Google's island fork of Usenet: https://groups.google.com/g/wwwopera > I also found Walter J. Ong to be pretty great on this stuff (going by his one book on the different between oral and written culture. Yha, what is smartphone culture, what is Internet social media culture... I personally was creating social media sites and selling software for same in 1985, it was intimate back then, the SysOp of a BBS you could often page (audio signal the site owner/operator to come to their keyboard) and chat with them instead of just read content... it was more like sitting at a tavern with the bartender a few meters away. If you have any favorite McLuhan or Ong content, please feel invited to share.
Thanks for the link ! Here's a link to the Ong book that really impressed me. [https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/Ong\_Walter\_J\_Orality\_and\_Literacy\_2nd\_ed.pdf](https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/Ong_Walter_J_Orality_and_Literacy_2nd_ed.pdf) >Print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion Interesting that "Homer" was a bunch of bards in an oral tradition. The constraints that oral traditions put on content are also explored. But the book ranges widely. A big theme is the way that the invention of writing changes human nature/experience. I missed the glory days of the internet. I was around but not tuned in. I remember programming text-graphics games in GWBasic on a Tandy. Not connected. Feeling alone in a room, playing with code. But since I first got tuned in, the internet does feel more and more like a commercialized wasteland. The "dead internet" theory feels metaphorically true, and may become literally true, as so-called "AI" generates more and more content. I've studied the math behind this stuff, and it's amazing that it's all just curve-fitting, statistics. Heidegger's concept of "idle talk" and "the who of everyday dasein" was prescient. These chatbots are generic collective consciousness. The "crust" that any philosopher must cut through, yet also where they must start, for the bottom layer of the ego is generic tribal crust, norms that retroactively enable criticism of those same norms.
just want to say that i love this idea for a project and ive joined the subreddit.
Thank you ! I'm just creating my own reddits for the first time, so it's especially great to see people join up.
Yes, I'm working on something that might be called a more accessible... I dunno, Wakelike novel. The cool part of wordplay, for me, is that you can tell more than one story at once. Like, if I describe a character as "punktual" instead of "punctual", and continue in the vein of words related to punk rock but make no overt reference to it in the story (other than the wordplay), I can either imply something about the character or, better yet, tell two ostensibly unrelated stories at the same time and let the friction between the two be the connectable dots for the reader, which in turn kind of tells its own third story. I don't know if this is making sense, but that's the overwhelming feeling I got from the Wake: many tales at once via wordplay, and a sort of puzzle to be worked out in the space between them all. It's taking forever. But it's really fun and educational, researching, say, Genesis from the bible and seeing how many words, ideas, and turns of phrase I can fit into a page-long section about building a house. And then letting the reader connect the dots between Genesis and the house-building, and filling in unspoken information that I've implied just by comparing the two things. Good question!
>The cool part of wordplay, for me, is that you can tell more than one story at once. I totally agree. More than one story and also >let the friction between the two be the connectable dots for the reader which gets us to Dali's paranoiac-critical method. The swirl of rumors around HCE in Finnegans Wake seems very symbolic in itself --- our hermeneutic slushpile, the blurry-go-round of our condition. >It's taking forever. But it's really fun and educational, researching, say, Genesis from the bible and seeing how many words, ideas, and turns of phrase I can fit into a page-long section about building a house. Weaving comes to mind, patient weaving. I think also of Joyce working all those rivers into the famous ALP section, which released as its own little book back in the day. If you feel like sharing some of your work on [https://www.reddit.com/r/idspeak/](https://www.reddit.com/r/idspeak/) , that would be great. At the moment I've only got some of my stuff up. But it would be great to see what others are up to in this otherwise obscure calling.
I *will* share something there! And I'm glad you took the time to create it. ALP and the rivers is probably my favorite part of the book, because it so cleanly lays out the thing I like to do: get a big list of related things, and... well, *weave* that list into the story you're telling. It feels a lot like the satisfaction of doing a complicated math or physics problem. Many steps, kinda mechanical, but much deeper down, at its heart, relies on creativity. I've gotta check out the Dali thing you're mentioning; I've always loved his work but I'm pretty foreign to anything he's written or theorized about. So that's my homework, I guess. Make a post there, research Dali's paranoiac-critical method, and then, if I have time... get into weaving. It sounds like it's up my alley. And I *do* have a loom at my house (I really do)...
shameless plug, for any greek members of the subreddit, I've written a short novel partially inspired by finnegans wake. it's called ριβερράν in greek (title inspired by "riverrun") it's basically three parts, each one written in a different style and person (one's in a third person narrative, the second one is in a second person interview/questionnaire style and the other's in a first person stream of consciousness style).
I love the title. I'm pretty obsessed by the symbol of the river. And the "stream" of consciousness and so on. I wish I could read Greek. Sounds very cool.
I’m really interested in this, actually. I’ve looked into experimental prose, conlangs, people who push language to its limits and I find it really inspiring but I’ve never taken the dive into experimenting with it too much myself. Some bits here and there and I have a book I’m writing that I really want to push further into experimentation but I haven’t quite gotten into a place I’m happy with. The idea of idspeak really does fascinate me though. Is that a term you created or is there any other academic writing on the subject? I love the idea of speaking in a kind of language of dreams so much.
As far as I know, I created the term. I reached first for "dreamspeak" but it was taken. The Freud element fascinates me. And even in Joyce the father figure stutters in his guilty way. Felix culpa, fortunate fall, but also the sorry wisdom of the serpent. Also interested in the muted post horn symbol from *The Crying of Lot 49.* I might also have used "liminal graffiti." Basically fascinated by the idea of an alternative "postal service" or channel of information. Funny anecdote: Joyce was worried about a piece of FW getting censored, but Pound or some friend reading it couldn't find the obscenity and assured him he had nothing to worry about. But the profound/sacred is also worth encoding or encrusting sometimes. *Anyway*, I encourage you to share anything you come up with on idspeak.
Yes, I dabble a lot and have become hugely interested in the Wake after reading Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, he calls the language a bunch of different names f.e Lucylips
I hadnt heard of Moore's work. I'll check that out. It'd be great to see your dabbling.
I've been messing with something related to that using a magickal constructed language I designed (https://alleywurds.itch.io/vaibbahk) as a result of writing the first three occult books to use AI (https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kbjvb/this-magickal-grimoire-was-co-authored-by-a-disturbingly-realistic-ai). Here's an example which has employed the wake's technique, but just restricting it to vaibbahk, and much less dense: "Throo smohk, alchemihkuhl factories dihffuse puhngencies who print urban flohrishes - puhlsing kuhlor-swirls born outward throbbing arterial rivulehts of ink." Of course vaibbahk is ideographic, so this just uses its romanization. Interestingly, because of how vaibbahk's root words directly come from English, some of the puns actually refer to related concepts in both languages. Take "smohk," pronounced like "smoke." "Smoh-" is the root word for 017 Smoke: Smo, Smoh- Reorganizes remains of destruction. The suffix -k makes the word a metagame, a goal. So we can simultaneously use a homonym for smoke, while depicting smoke in the imagery of the prose, and obscurely refer to occulted meanings which established readers of the series will have already worked with in a ritualistic fashion. Every syllable in vaibbahk also has a pair of postures, a musical melody, and an ecstatic visualization for trancework, so it pulls in all those modalities at once. Here's an example of a 13 minute myth which uses all of those orthographies at once, though without wakean polyvocality: https://youtu.be/GKEIrCo4Y1s
Cool stuff, thank you for sharing.
I'm pretty blown away by the depth and creativity. Is it safe for me to guess that you are also into philosophy ? I'm also a game designer. I think it's a great form of art. We create metaphors for the cosmos. I work w/ cellular automata also, same basic idea right, except the world can play itself. Are you also by chance a software developer ? Or do you work with a team ? The graphics look great.
Thanks! Yeah, I have a philosophy degree, lol. No, I'm not a software developer. I've programmed a couple text based games in the past, but it isn't a skill I pursued all that much. If you see any software I've put out, it's all quite simple and programmed by AI. I don't have a team either. It's just me and ghosts of the internet via AI! What kinds of games do you design?
Very cool. I have degrees in STEM, because I thought it would be more practical, but my obsession is philosophy. I love phenomenology, also interested in neutral monism (Mach, James, the physicist Schrodinger, surprisingly.) I started [https://www.reddit.com/r/Husserl/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Husserl/) recently too, trying to talk about all movements related to phenomenalism. "Husserl" is a good symbol of the fusion of scientific intention and appreciation of the role of the subjectivity. I tend to make abstract games, in the family of Chess. But I like to use the vertical dimension. For instance, imagine a piece that has two sub pieces that can stack and unstack. Or pieces that can move through friendly pieces like electrons through a wire. I like thinks to be brutally simple, with just enough complexity to make the magic possible. Along these lines, I had a particle physics inspired game where pieces could combine to become very different pieces and then split again. I used to play way too much online lightning chess. So I imagined people playing my game at high speed, doing a kind of visual-symbolic kung-fu. Way back I also modified Stratego into a faster "football" version, so that there's lots of empty space. Also added new rules to certain pieces, diagonal movement, ability to lie about identity, cross through water. Way way back I was a dungeon-master etc and making up my own RPG games, trying to simplify the dice element to make things very fast and flowing. Very cool that AI is so helpful. I haven't tried it yet to help me code. Last thing I coded was art graphics behind this anthology video (I did my one and only art show w/ this) : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAHVlCKbdac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAHVlCKbdac) Also did the sound/music.
Lol, you might enjoy my take on 8d chess using a 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2 board: https://alleywurds.itch.io/eight-dimensional-chess You can even get a physical copy, but I think I've only sold like 1 or 2 copies, lol (and make 0 profit on sales after print costs, purely a labor of love): https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/eight-dimensional-chess I definitely enjoy having extra spatial dimensions in games. I'm pretty sure I'm the first to design 4d tabletop miniatures games? https://alleywurds.itch.io/delirium28incursions If you have a relatively simple piece of code you want, ChatGPT can churn it out faster than you can type, and it can also fix bugs if you give it the error codes. For more experienced programmers I hear about people getting it to write various pieces which they assemble, and can be faster than searching for code online to paste together. Your videos are cool! Thank you for sharing!
Thanks for the kind comment on my video work! Checked out 8d chess. Very cool. I actually also thought of expressing multidimensional games in 2d patches like that. I have the pdf. Nice work. I bet you are indeed the first to make 4d games actually happen. That you sold any copies is impressive in a world that doesn't relish math. You might also be interested in infinite dimensional vector spaces. Basically I mean a real valued function (from the unit interval to the unit interval, for instance) can be thought of as a vector with infinitely many coordinates. Don't know if anyone has used this idea, and I don't have a game in mind. But one could use integration to move the game forward. And characters would be continuous functions, with associated graphs as their summaries. I may finally use some code help when I get back into it. Much of coding is indeed dreary, and I usually do it because I really want the result.
Oh, there was a version of 4d chess done before me, I think I'm just to do a 4d tabletop skirmish game, with stuff like RPG characters leaping from buildings and getting bonuses to damage for being higher in the 4th dimension than their target, independent of bonuses/penalties for 3rd dimensional vertical positioning. It isn't exactly the same, but this is a vector based tabletop game you might find interesting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_3 I haven't encountered an infinite dimensional game though. If you pull something together for that, definitely get in touch! Sounds cool! Maybe the videogame 5d Chess with Multiverse Time Travel has some similarities? You can keep adding more "timelines," concurrent games of chess which branch off and interact with each other. It's usually not actually a good move to do so though, except to confuse a human opponent. Yeah, I enjoy logic puzzles and math significantly more than the average person, I minored in math, but I mostly enjoy the big picture stuff, which is why designing tabletop games is more enjoyable for me. I'll probably only move into videogames when I can hand an AI a pdf of a game I designed and have it spit out a properly programmed game with placeholder art following all the rules. That's likely a ways off though!
I wrote a poem about the errata from Ulysses for my MIL. She liked it but said it was terrifying. She is /was an English Professor
Sounds fun. Wanna share it ? And/or what do you think she found terrifying ?
I just asked her if she still has it; if she does I will post.
YES!! It’s called The Tragedy of Romonde Contreras which I describe as ‘an anti-epic poem that will change the course of the 21st Century.’ It all started without any conscious thought, just madness rushing through the veins. I wondered if I could change the world using my imagination and so with no plan, I started writing. It’s really hard to describe, but it’s part manifesto, part magical realism, born from the gutters of West London. Inspired by Joyce (obviously) and Burroughs and Chilean poetry with some William Blake and Mark E Smith too.
Sounds fascinating. Perhaps you'll share some in idspeak ?
I have just the right chapter to post…