Ideas for essays
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- This I Believe +
- Various Quaker things +
- Collaborative Anthologies +
Powered by the Apocalypse is a tabletop role playing framework developed by Meguey and Vincent Baker, originally for the game Apocalypse World but later publicly released for anyone to use. This provides ample opportunities for anyone seeking to make their universes collaborative to do so with low overhead. It seemed like a perfect for a setting so focused on stories, given its low emphasis on mechanics and focus on the storytelling. Post-Self in particular uses the minimal hack Simple World which aims to reduce complexity even further.
A perfect combination.
In this setting, your story takes place more than a hundred years in the future in a time where humanity has figured out how to upload consciousnesses to a digital world called at first simply the System (a holdover from its early days of secrecy, so vague a name as to keep discussions hard to trace) and later, after a launch of two smaller copies out of the Solar system, Lagrange, Castor, and Pollux.
+In this setting, your story takes place more than a hundred years in the future in a time where humanity has figured out how to upload consciousnesses to a digital world called at first simply the System (a holdover from its early days of secrecy, so vague a name as to keep discussions hard to trace) and later, after a launch of two smaller copies out of the Solar system, Lagrange — the construct that remained at the Earth-Moon L5 point — and the two launch vehicles (LVs), Castor and Pollux.
+The System is not a purely digital haven. It’s not a construct bound by our ideas of some virtual reality. They tried, at first, and some remnants remain from that — new creations or instances are still tagged with a unique hash in the form of eight hexadecimal digits and System denizens still speak of sims and avatars — but that’s not how the System ended up working. When it was first created, those who remained phys-side couldn’t conceptualize it in any other way. Those sys-side, however, knew better. Rather than an analogue to virtual reality, it was more like a consensual dream. What was possible on the System was limited to that which all minds could consensually dream.
+This was, at first, pure chaos. That limit alone was not quite enough: what all were able to imagine did not guarantee that all sys-side actually experienced the same thing, and it wasn’t until late 2110s that work was put in place to ensure that experiences were truly consensual.
+The fact remains, however, that the world has more in common with dreams than with a dream of the physical world than the ‘net.
+TODO
The perisystem architecture is the conceptual foam of computer-stuff in which individuals reside and items such as sims, food, very nice fountain pens, and very fine paper exist. However, it also contains large amounts of information in the form of books, the reputation market, and various information feeds.
Some maintenance of the perisystem architecture is required, usually by engineers both sys-side and phys-side. In the instance of the two launch vehicles, for instance, PA engineers managed the DMZ later called Convergence
-The System is not a purely digital haven. It’s not a construct bound by our ideas of some virtual reality. They tried, at first, and some remnants remain from that — new creations or instances are still tagged with a unique hash in the form of eight hexadecimal digits and System denizens still speak of sims and avatars — but that’s not how the System ended up working. When it was first created, those who remained phys-side couldn’t conceptualize it in any other way. Those sys-side, however, knew better. Rather than an analogue to virtual reality, it was more like a consensual dream. What was possible on the System was limited to that which all minds could consensually dream.
-This was, at first, pure chaos. That limit alone was not quite enough: what all were able to imagine did not guarantee that all sys-side actually experienced the same thing, and it wasn’t until late 2110s that work was put in place to ensure that experiences were truly consensual.
-The fact remains, however, that the world has more in common with dreams than with a dream of the physical world than the ‘net.
-Post-Self is a tabletop role playing game powered by The Apocalypse, a lightweight framework for RPGs.