Very odd jobs

People in made-up disciplines wanted at Burning Zeppelin Experience. I've gone with K. A. Boom, parameteorologist, but that only skims the surface of spooky atmospheres.

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Do they believe in us?

Look at what Harald is doing with magic in his house rules for World of Darkness.

And how about those concepts in making a polycosmos work? The idea belief makes a thing more possible and disbelief less is a way overlapping planes could be separated.

The take on ghosts as the dead who don't accept is familiar, so how about the idea of ghosts as beings who do? They want to believe we're here and so, increasingly, we are.

Could that be a horror story for Flash Fearsday? Here's my 140-character effort.

I woke. They stood there. Aliens? 

They looked me over, smiled. "You are real," they said. "We made you. And all you know." 

"No!" 

"Let us play."

Is it more of that gamer horror? You can try at Lunching on Lamias too. I still haven't written anything for Jennie's Expansion Joints this week, but I'm getting there. You?
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Spectral entities: sun dogs; lens flayers; bokeh-men

This is inspired by the spaceport people table at Lunching at Lamias, a good source of ideas.

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Sun dogs flash from their kennels beyond ken and into existence wherever light shines and is refracted through ice crystals. Their bark is worse than their bite if the attention ought to be elsewhere, but they may well do direct harm to the incautious if incited through staring.

Lens flayers burst into reality on streams of photons running between light source and observer, and hang in the air, perhaps in numbers, latching onto a lens and bleeding contrast. They are believed to be vassals only, used to add a sense of truth to creation, and are captured by arcane means by certain artists for the same, perhaps as devotion.

Bokeh-men wait in the background of the observed world and emerge the moment focus is lost, growing to fill space even as they become more diffuse, surrendering their energies to feed a dominant central figure. Like the lens flayers they are easily made cliche, but it is conceivable they submit to this so as to lull the observer into a sopor.

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I don't have game stats, but if they jump you, a good defence may be closing the eyes.
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Worldboats on the flood

Here's my entry for the Saturday Centus at Jenny Matlock's blog. The challenge is to write a story in 100 words, not including the phrase given, which this week is:

April showers bring May flowers...

I've decided to expand on the Worldboats concept, which was first introduced here by NetherWerks and is based on a comment by C'nor. I added my spin here.

Anyone can contribute to the Worldboat project or write a Saturday Centus entry.

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Owls and Pussycats from Beyond Space

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.

"The Owl and the Pussycat", Edward Lear                      

An attempt at developing that new idea from NetherWerks and C'nor, the Worldboat.

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Need input

What if that ?siD really does exist? How could it be proven? Here are a few of the latest posts from our part of the blogopshere on getting data, the uses of it and its value.

A Soviet sample return mission that never got off the ground at Beyond Apollo. Such a lot of work for such little quantities. It's all we have.

One day the data in this world-building spreadsheet at The Orb might be matched against that for other systems. Until then we dream. Nanotech helps with that of course, as this post at Science In My Fiction reminds us. Even fantasy fans might like the idea that the long-lost Damascus steel could have had nanotubes.

For a cool take on the world-building that is terraforming, try the Garteil at Riskail.

Interesting thoughts on trusting instruments at Ghost Hunting Theories. Esoteric the field may seem, but I'd say the point is a wider one. I'm no Luddite, but I stand by my comment: "Industry might be the point. There's money in those devices, but also the impression of science in carrying one."

More on the mind and body in the latest post, if you're happy with horror and can accept strong language. Never hurts to read the criticism either.

From 3D to ?siD

I've been pondering the subject of psychic powers and magic. Here's an odd and possibly even horrifying look at how they might work.

To understand the idea we need to think about the differences between 2D and 3D. Imagine a 2D world, strung across the room you're now in and perfectly immaterial. Imagine tiny 2D lifeforms getting on with their lives inside, moving across the surface and around each other of course because they can't go over or under.

Now imagine you step up to that flat world and make contact with the very tip of your finger. What's that going to look like from their point of view? Maybe an area of their world fills with an alien material, and friends and colleagues vanish.

Keep pushing and as the finger widens from the tip, the area of destruction in their world widens, and more bystanders are lost. If the world isn't perfectly immaterial, some of those individuals might even get pushed out of their world, either on or in your finger. What would happen if you blew on the world? Or sneezed?

Life, but not as we know it (1)

Following on from the mention of Discworld in the last post but one, and all the talk of the scope of fiction, here's the first of a series on especially unusual fictional lifeforms.

This one's from Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett, possibly one of the first places you'd expect to find something out of the ordinary (except maybe The BFG..?). I'm a latecomer to Pratchett, and for many years was a bit closed-minded about the Discworld series. Now I realise what I've been losing, with the earlier books at least. It's good, unexpectedly old-fashioned fun, unpretentious. Pratchett's one of us. What I like most is the way we're given idea after deep idea seemingly only as a catalyst for the jokes.

The scope of fiction

Something weirder than normal today, and absolutely enormous. To understand it best you probably need to have been following the posts here over the past few days. Because of this I recommend you at least skim these three before reading any further.

• Sensor range, on reconciling ghosts with hard sci-fi etc. and the soul with deep physics, plus what remains when measurable life signs end and a possible nature of information
• All ways?, a list of fictional portals which has grown massively, and is still growing - with no end in sight - thanks to the good readers of this blog
• Sizing up dimensions, an attempt to define 'dimension' in fiction

You might also want to look at the last card in yesterday's post. It gets to the point.

Done all that? Well, the bad news is no cartographer with experience of hyperdimensional manifolds came forward, so I had to make a start on the mapping myself. So here's my attempt at sketching the scope of fiction. It's only a sketch mind, a starting point for discussion, so be kind. The point is to show where the human imagination can and does roam, whether in cinema, comics, literature, gaming or any other sphere, including dreams, even in pseudo- and semi-pseudoscience. Everything.

Here's what I came up with.

Sizing up dimensions

Short post, big subject.

First of all, thanks to everyone who's contributed so far to yesterday's list of portals. It's an ongoing project so keep those suggestions coming. That list is the spark for this.

And here it is then, that big subject. What exactly is a dimension?

In the fictional sense I mean. I used the term in the introduction to the list and a reply to Jebediah, but I gave no serious thought to what I meant. We know what a dimension is in the everyday sense, and by extension in physics, but that's not really what we mean when it comes to cinema, comics, literature and gaming. It's the tip of the iceberg.

Spirits in a material world

Does Shawn Gately at Blue Table Painting read this blog?

I got the feeling we're kindred spirits in a gaming sense during the recent road trip vid, but his latest (embedded lower down this page) is far closer. It was actually posted two days ago, but manages to cover what the Expanse covered yesterday. I guess grate minds do think alike. He does say at the begining he can travel through time...

If you want his thoughts, the really good stuff starts at 8:55. It's brief.

If you like the gravity idea he mentions, you also might like what Science In My Fiction had to say about the subject yesterday. It's not too heavy and has interesting implications for interstellar travel, in fiction first of course.

For the song in the title, another video. If you're a fan of music, watch to the end for an interview. For more fun, guess Mr Copeland's accent. The cosmos gets a mention too.

Sensor range

Anyone who's never visited Riskail should take a good look, for descriptions of a Truly Weird World. Sci-fi fans could try these recent posts on a transhuman type and various planets, while fantasy fans might find more in a new take on wizards or a dozen cults. The blog always inspires me. I am going somewhere with this, somewhere in the clouds.

In the last day or so I've visited Ghost Hunting Theories for the first time, and read this post at The Digital Cuttlefish. Things started happening in my mind.

How can we reconcile ghosts with hard sci-fi, or even high fantasy? How does the soul fit into deep physics? What remains of us in the world when measurable life signs end?

I will now speculate on these ideas, but in the far-out spirit of Riskail, as if getting ready to write something of that calibre. Sit tight.