Paradoxical

Human beings are extremely good at finding patterns like faces and animals and other images in random things like clouds, a phenomenon called pareidolia. I am convinced that most sightings of ghosts, orbs, invisible beings, etc are just pareidolia This is especially true of small children, who don't have the experience needed to recognize that what they're seeing is just their brain's natural pattern-seeking software glitching out. Over time, we gain that experience, and so we "see spirits" less often because most of us have the sense to realize that what we're seeing isn't real.

Emphasis on "most." There are definitely a lot of times when multiple people are seeing the same thing. And while some of even those might still be pareidolia, others might be something else.

Been thinking about the 90's scifi TV show "Sliders" lately, because it was most likely what first introduced me to the idea of the multiverse, and traveling it. First two seasons were pretty good, and then the quality took a sharp nose dive. Three of the main cast eventually left, the guy who invented the sliding technology got merged with someone else to explain why he was recast. Oh, and the final season ended on a cliffhanger.

I don't recall what channel it was on that I was able to watch it, but I must have stopped watching it somewhere in seasons 1 or 2, because there are some things that happened that I don't remember seeing, like when they introduced a recurring villain species of alternate humans, the kromaggs. Everything I've heard and read and seen about the kromaggs makes me think they were a good idea, even if a lot of people were upset by it. But yeah, you can only do "new world of the week" format for so long before it gets stale. Introducing a species of highly technologically advanced alternate humans that are going around to other Earths and conquering, destroying, or raiding them for supplies is a great way to add stakes. And the kromaggs looked pretty interesting, very visually distinct. I feel bad I never got to see that arc when the series was airing.

This made me think of a few things. First, I think I might have enough material about my Ravenstone series' multiverse to make a show with a similar premise, especially with a bit of writing help. Especially since that multiverse contains entities that control the fates of trillions of universes, entities like the deadly Nightmare, or like The Director, who doesn't destroy; they take people's free will from them and turns them into Heroes or Villains for their melodramatic stories, the kind of story changing over the centuries. Their current obsession is "steampunk in outer space." And then there are weird and creepy locations like Twilight or Stillness. There's universes where the form of Christianity that swept the world was very different from Catholicism. Worlds where Christianity / monotheism never arose. Worlds with entirely different magic systems from the main Neighborhood of universes the series takes place in (like the area of The Director, for one example). And because of "trailing universes" and "timeskip universes," a series set in that multiverse can even do something resembling time travel, without the same consequences. If you go to a world where it's still 1950 and you kill your parents before they can meet, that doesn't affect you at all because those aren't your parents, those are multiverse doubles of your parents. Most you can do is make a new universe where you don't exist.

Then, too, another thing I thought of is someone could adapt the "Long Earth" series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter into a TV series. It would be great, as it has a multiverse to explore, but the twist is that the multiverse is mostly empty of sapient life, apart from a few "joker" worlds like our earth, and some species from the homo genus that started Stepping long ago and evolved to adapt to wandering the long Earth.

The best part about adapting "The Long Earth" to TV would be that the book series is complete, you don't need to worry about coming up with new stories, just adapt the books' stories to television. You might have to do a little padding here and there to stretch it out, but there's obvious angles to do that from, including history and current politics. I'm thinking one book per season, so we mainly focus in season one on switching between the arcs of the settlers' journeys, and Lobsang and his friends exploring the high megas. Maybe throw in a few small foreshadowing bits for future arcs like the Next. Then book two becomes season two, and so on.

I guess the main issue would be getting the rights to do that. But I think it would be a great series. There's only so many books, so it's not like the series could easily overstay its welcome, as long as you actually stop the series at the last book and don't go trying to pull a "Supernatural" or "The Simpsons" by letting it live beyond the time it should have died.

I need to think of a good slang term for something in the witch world. The something in question is... how to explain this... when shadow-walking¹ (teleportation), what the magic is doing is you hide your body so the magic can force your whole body into a macroscopic quantum superposition, so it's technically quantum teleportation on a macro scale; the concealment is to prevent the observer effect from interfering.² And in very rare instances, sometimes the superposition collapses in a way that the person ceases to exist. I haven't decided yet if that's an actual thing or just exceptionally rare, but either way it's something some witches use to excuse why they don't shadow-walk... they don't want to cease to exist or end up somewhere they can't get back from. That phenomenon, real or not in-world, is what I need a slang term for.

Or at least that's what their best scientists think the magic is doing. Whether they're right or not... I dunno. But I treat it as though it's accurate until I decide otherwise.

The assumption with the phenomenon I need a term for is that either the shadow-walking person couldn't muster enough Will to reappear at their destination while still mustering enough to vanish, or that something else sees them in the stream and snatches them away in the middle of the trip. Which, given the existence in-universe of Shadow People, that isn't an impossibility.

The truth is that, whether it happens at all or not, it would be exceptionally rare regardless, because it takes a LOT of magic to cause something to go into the superposition state to begin with, and the matter "wants" to exist; whether it exists in point A or point B is irrelevant... if the process is interrupted, there's a LOT of weight to existence, so any chance of the matter not existing is so tiny that for all practical purposes, it's zero. But the phenomenon still needs a name because some people are scared of it and so they would still call it something.

The only real evidence for it being real in-world, and not just an urban legend, is the fact that if your thoughts wander when you shadow-walk, there's a possibility you can end up somewhere other than your destination. In the chapter I'm working on, Vedya experiences this first-hand by reappearing near Dalia instead of where she was trying to go, because she had been thinking about Dalia at the last second.


1 = Shadow-walking/light-walking/mist-walking, and also (sort of) with Blinking. Blinking, while it's mistaken for super-fast shadow-walking, is slightly different from shadow-walking, as there's no real concealment. The person literally vanishes in the blink of an eye; the Blinking tattoo speeds up their perception so they can do it at all, and forces observers to blink their eyes when the user is about to vanish.

2 = Yes I am aware that the person teleporting would be an observer, and also it is possible to bring other people along while shadow-walking (but not with Blinking), adding another observer. But the concealment process blinds the observers temporarily. Yes yes, I know, I know, but it works anyway Because Magic.

I hope, if/when we get out of this fascist rut we're in, that one of the things that gets done in the aftermath of fixing all the damage is that the Republican party is disbanded, all politicians who were Republicans are barred from any and all public offices for the rest of their lives, we disband the Democrats as well for being ineffectual do-nothings while the ship was sinking, create or promote a bunch of third parties to take their places, and establish mandatory ranked-choice voting. Under the new system, it would be a crime punishable by a steep fine to NOT vote, and you would be able to not just vote FOR someone, but also AGAINST candidates, ranking your votes from "Yes I want this person very much" to "under no circumstances should this person be allowed in office," and everything in between.

The ads on the various games on my phone have gotten unbearable. I was fine with them when it was just the tiny X you had to hit. Now what I end up having to do is pressing a link reading "Google Play store" and then I have to hit the back button at the exact right amount of time after clicking that for it to go back into the app, and if I'm lucky, it will then bring up the X to click. More often than not, though, what it does instead is restart the fucking app! Which means restarting the level I was on if I'm especially unlucky, or if I'm just mildly unlucky, any reward that I might have gotten for watching the ad is just fucking gone.

I need to find out if there's an app I can install on my phone that will kill all of the ads or at least put them back to the way they were when it was just pressing the X. Because before this change, I could put up with the ads pretty much indefinitely. But now it's to the point where I get maybe a half hour of play time in before I just fucking give up in frustration.