Gaming

After Stephanie's last answer I was curious about her interest in gaming.  Here's what she said.

http://www.bloodinthesun.com/

 

An orc high priestess and belongs to the 'gabba gabba hey tribe'


Greg (her husband) and I are going to be playing in Blood in the Sun Warhammer tournament next month - June 23-24, 2012.

I've been painting my army of Orcs and Goblins for almost a year, but didn't start playing until a few months ago.  The rules are fantastically difficult, and I can't seem to get a handle on how to deploy my units.  I'm far more interested in Math-hammer -- calculating the probability that I will win instead of actually playing to win.  I started writing a battle simulator, but all of the unit permutations became too tiresome.  Chess is soooooo much simpler (challenge me at www.chess.com - Geman_Marcotte).  

I'm going to have to play five games of Warhammer in two days at the tournament - dang!  I think I'll buy my opponents bloody marys and get em tanked so I have a fighting chance.  The whole thing will be live via pod-cast, so tune in and check out the action.

You are also a musician.  What instruments do you play and do you have any projects going on right now?

What bands inspire you creatively?  Why?

I play guitar, bass, piano and drums, but haven’t written any songs in a long time.  I played the heck out of rock band drums for the last three years and finally decided to get a real (electronic) drum set that has the high hat and snare in the right places and crash and ride symbols. It is sooooooo much more satisfying.  It’s the best workout ever – it works my shoulders and obliques and lats and pecs.  

No bands really inspire me lately.  I think it’s because listening to music makes me sad that I’m not writing and recording it and actively jamming in a band (I don’t really care about playing out).  But now that I’m drumming, I’ve been listening to music differently and paying attention to only the drums – mostly the Stones and Phish.  It takes a lot of concentration to pick out just the kick and snare so you can copy it, and then adding the high hat (with pedal), additional drums, and cymbals is like a spastic palsy puzzle until it all comes together and you can groove on it – then you feel like a total rock star!  It’s very meditative because there’s no room for any internal dialog. I’m going to the Summer Camp music festival at the end of the month, so I could have a surge of musical inspiration, we’ll see…

I am interested in writing a couple of education themed rockin’ albums that make learning hard stuff fun like the constitution, physics concepts, spelling, and other things where you are supposed to memorize a bunch of facts to spit back out on a test. I know I could write it pretty quickly, it’s just the stupid marketing that keeps me from doing it, and because I’m putting all of my energy into selling ‘Scarlet Begonias’ and playing Warhammer (and painting my Orcs and Goblins units) for the Blood in the Sun tournament in June.

If anyone can recommend bands and music for Stephanie put it in the comments.  

What other authors or books have inspired you?

 

Rudy Rucker - Infinity and the Mind -- You gave me that one.  (actually my husband Pat gave her that one)

 

Carlos Castenda - The whole series - especially Journey to Ixtlan and the Art of Dreaming

 

Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) - Be Here Now -- did you ever realize that there was a Richard Alpert on LOST?

 

Issac Asimov - The Foundation Trilogy

 

Douglas Adams - Hitchhiker's guide to the Universe

 

Clive Barker - Weaveworld, Imagjica

What are your feelings on psychedelic drugs and do you think they hold any clues into figuring out the universe?   

 

Answer:

I'm going to talk about Chakras because I think they form a good model for discussing different aspects of existence (as is the five element design of acupuncture / shiatsu).  But, I don’t believe that the energy level of a chakra can be measured, and I don't believe in paying some con-artists to balance them with a charm on necklace or colored crystals or any other nonsense like that.

 

According to medical intuitive and author, Caroline Myss, who described chakras in her work Anatomy of the Spirit (1996), "Every thought and experience you've ever had in your life gets filtered through these chakra databases. Each event is recorded into your cells...", in effect your biography becomes your biology.^[13

    ---> Maybe she means mitochondiral DNA

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Background:

 

 

 

1 - Sahasrara - master chakra that controls all the other chakras.

2 - Ajna - Third eye, is the chakra of time, insight, and perception.

3 - Vishuddha - related to the communication, expression and growth.

 

4 - Anahata - controls our emotions by virtue of its relation to love, equilibrium, and well-being.

 

5 - Manipura - Related to the energy, assimilation and power. Character strength.

 

6 - Swadhisthana - related to emotion, sexuality and creativity.

 

7 - Muladhara - chakra of instinct, survival and security - fear.  

 

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If there was any real energy associated with these seven filters for viewing existence, then I think the sum of the seven would always have to = 100%. 

 

I think that the use of psychedelics throws that balance out of whack so that the 2nd chakra gets too much of the pie, (premature omniscience) and the rest of the six suffer for it.  But, i've never met anyone who is perfectly balanced, and being reasonably out of whack is what makes us have an interesting personality. So, having a beefed up third eye is what my identity is all about.  

 

As far as clues - yes - psychadelics help us (well me at least) have a "higher" vantage point when considering my place (and the architecture of) the universe.  But, high vantage points and widened perspective comes at a price.  I'm as high as I want to go now - any more, and I'd be in the same existential pickle as Suzi Greenberg. 

 

 

In the great words of David St. Hubbins:

Spinal Tap Elvis grave scene - YouTube

From Rob Reiner's " Spinal Tap" movie. A funny scene where the band ... " Too much facking perspective now" Quite possible one of the funniest lines in comedy ...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnsIxSEx3Yk

YouTube - Videos from this email

Book Title

My question for Stephanie today is...


You are obviously a Grateful Dead fan.  Of all of their songs why did you pick Scarlet Begonias as your book title?  Was it always going to be the book title or did you consider others?

Good question.  I picked this show (April 27^th, 1991 – Las Vegas) as the backdrop for many of the chapters for three reasons:

1)     I was at the show, and I thought I could print a copy of my mail order ticket stub (and all of the notes I took all over it), but it turned out that I would have had to fight Rhino and Santana and the dancing skeleton artist in order to print it – so I scrapped the idea.

2)     The last song of the show is ‘The Weight’, and that fits perfectly with the missing mass from the International Prototype Kilogram mystery.

3)     I was granted permission by Robert Hunter and Ice Nine Publishing, Inc. to print a recurring line of obscured and garbled lyrics from ‘Scarlet Begonias’ which I use to bind the plot.

“Once in a while you get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right”

Once I picked the show, I wove in subtle bits from the other songs to tie the story all together. The end of the book has the Psycho-Cartographers traveling back through the continuum to try and rescue Suzi at the concert during a stellar version of ‘Scarlet Begonias’.

As for the title.  I had a short list of contenders (Suzi and the Psycho-Cartographers, Qualia Spectarum, The Interval of the Wolf, The Ouisa), but the clear and elegant choice was always, ‘Scarlet Begonias’.  Robert Hunter requested that I choose another title, even though there wouldn’t be any copyright issues. I have pangs of guilt about going ahead and using it anyway, but none of the other titles would do.  I hope he forgives me!  I sent a signed copy of the book to him yesterday via Ice Nine Publishing.

Sam Boyd Silver Bowl

April 27, 1991

Las Vegas, NV

Touch of Grey

Walkin' Blues
Friend of the Devil
Mexicali Blues
Maggie's Farm
Loose Lucy
Cassidy
Might as Well

Sugar Magnolia
Scarlet Begonias
Fire on the Mountain
Playin' in the Band
Uncle John's Band
drums / space

I Need a Miracle
Black Peter
One More Saturday Night

The Weight

Time Travel Question

I wondered about the time travel aspect of this book and Stephanie's preoccupation with it.  I asked her exactly what being able to time travel would mean to her.  This was her response as of today.

"The concept of time travel ties together a bunch of conundrums that I like to wrestle with, and they all lead back to the mass-energy-time-perception continuum.  Time, in itself, is perplexing.  I’m pretty sure that time isn’t linear in the grand scale.  I’m also pretty sure that there is no beginning or end to “time”.  I imagine time to be like a donut shaped tesseract that keeps turning inward upon itself.   I like to play around with thought experiments like Young’s double-slit experiment and Einstein’s train and platform experiment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity#Einstein.27s_train_thought_experiment

I’m fascinated by simultaneity and the fact that “time” can’t really ever be measured accurately.  My curiosity was kicked into high gear when Sayid from LOST explained how to triangulate a signal, and it made me realize that it is impossible to know when and where you are unless you can be simultaneously aware at three (ideally four) different places at the same time. And that made me wonder if all electrons and photons are like the Borg.

That’s really what I wonder about – is it bad for the psyche to wonder about the Borg."

I try my hardest to forget about the Borg, Steph.  

I would like to point out that Stephanie actually copied and pasted the Einstein's train and platform experiment section from the link I added into her response to me.  She did not just give me the link.  I did it like that.

She often includes such things because she likes to back up her thoughts with any research she has done.  

But me as her cosmic pal, I want to cut to the chase and just hear her words and ideas as they stand on their own.  So you blog readers can choose if you read any links I add. 

But, I think Stephanie's words stand alone.  

I also asked Stephanie.  If you could time travel THEN would you be happy?

"I already am happy :).  I’m not so much in the mood to time travel right now, I just like thinking about the concept of time travel.  I think that pondering it is probably much more enjoyable than actually doing it."

I wanted to know more about how mania played a part in Stephanie's creative process.  Since she said she wrote the book "during a particularly manic period which I like to call Operation Zyzzybaluba."

I too have been driven creatively by mania and was very curious.  This is what she had to say about mania.

I love mania as long as it doesn't bleed into delusional thinking. I was very close to the cusp when I started writing scarlet begonias.

I'd been doing research on wikipedia like a mad person and have a drawer full of documentation supporting my theories, of which only a few finally became part of my research. So I need to write more to incorporate the other hypotheses.

Prime numbers, dark matter, and vacuums will be the focus of my next book. I think it will be a conspiracy theory mystery that also takes place in the dreamscape.