Who is Yano Solong?

Now that these blog posts are appearing on my Twitter and (shudder) other social networks, some people may be asking themselves, Just who is this Yano Solong? I'd like to draw back the curtain and invite you inside my wunderkammer:

A rebel hero. A wanderer of the psyche. A self-aware fictional character, Yano Solong is the son of Han Solo and the grandson of a French anti-hero named Lone Sloane, created by a young author to serve as his avatar in an autobiographical space opera, set in an armada of corporate warships known as the Nova Consortium, on the anarchic fringes of which Yano S. was the pilot of a small mailroom freighter. Along with his co-author, androidized clerk Douglas Reich, Yano conducted raids against the fleet of Fleet Commander Bill van Fleet and thwarted the flamboyant dealings of Darth Scarf, Sith lord and relentless windbag. After rescuing Reich from the clutches of the supercomputer Nova1 Sonomi, Yano and Douglas escaped to the desert resort city of Safern on the planet Shenker 4, where they lost track of each other. It was some time before the young Yano, finding himself living in the Imperial Capital, reforged an old bond with the illustrious Dr. Lance Cardigan, elective prosthetics expert, and the two set to work building an engine of knowledge and discovery known as the Science Patrol.

It was during this time that Yano increasingly became this author's online pseudonym for all explorations of science fact and fiction, the building of new realities, and the study of ancient and dying arts. Now working as a freelance reality builder, learning the trade of harnessing lightning, Yano continues to tinker in his workshop on the structure of time and space itself.

By the way, most of the original stories of Yano Solong and Douglas Reich have been lost, but the legends remain, and may be set down on paper again sometime in the future. Continue to follow his adventures through all three venues:

Science Patrol

The Voyages of Yano Solong

Yano Solong's Twitter Feed

So long,
Yano

How Realities Are Created

"What is Reality?" -Philip K. Dick

The Philip K. Dick head. Photo courtesy of jmarshallpittman.

It's a common idea in video-game theory that we are seeing the birth of an entirely new art-form, something that has never been seen before, and that many people will soon go flying off into the future of virtual worlds. It's an even commoner idea in antique ways of thinking that this is a horrible proposition and we should destroy the machines before they destroy us.

the truth is neither as dramatic or as mundane as all that. actually, i believe video games are the future in a field of study that's older than history: the quest to mediate reality.

Neurologically, all our knowledge of the world around us is mediated--transformed by our sensory apparatus into something the brain can process. this interface of your senses with your brain is the original set of virtual-reality goggles, a fully immersive interface that displays data to you that most of us usually assume to be "reality." It is, in fact, mediated reality, which is very different. it is, to put it bluntly, a bubble, constructed around the Self, through which nothing can pass before being transformed so our brain can digest it. It is a tiny world that only exists for one person, and these worlds can vary infinitely.

So, right from the start, we understand that all reality is constructed, and that we use a meat machine to interact with the squishy stuff, and that different worlds exist, different head-spaces created by this tendency of our mind to create a world around us. Each brain inside his own environment, whether it's a jungle, a hovel, or a grand central station of ideas. The point is not that each of us has our own---we all have hundreds. Thousands. (Try to have even more.)

So the idea of creating our own realities that exist independent of the four-dimensional universe, that exist alongside our own, in thoughts, dreams, stories, plays, music, movies, or lines of code, well, that's something our people have been working on since the very beginning. the cave paintings at Lascaux were the original Disneyland ride, the first movie. The Philip K. Dick head is one of the most advanced. These arts are called media because they insert another layer of translation onto the world, interpret reality and tell their own story. The ancient jewish mystics would descend into a cave whose walls gave off a vapor that delivered psychedelic revelations of the One True God. They emerged and wrote the Scriptures which are still studied today as glimmerings of "unmediated truth"--while the medium actually exists right underneath the ground. This is what books are--a translation of a previously experienced mental state, which may or may not create another instance of the author's thought, or a new shard of his thought which has a completely different effect on someone else.

in any case, mediation is our first tool, the equivalent of our first joystick or NES controller, movie projector and personal musical singing theater, the thing we grab to make sense of and take part in the world. Making video games is not only natural, it's necessary to move forward the Human Experiment, the quest to interact with all existence in a way that's meaningful and pleasurable for all parties.

and this idea of strapping goggles on your head and using a wired-up glove or a Wii-mote to grab things and move ideas around inside your headspace, well, to me it's the natural extension of what we've done so far. I will become a cyborg, because we have always been cyborgs. Weld the keyboard finger- and wrist-bones into my hands, and the analog rotary servocontrollers into my thumb joints, and make me whole.

In future explorations of CREATING REALITIES, I'll delve further into old and new realities I have loved, and look at how all kinds of different realities can talk with each other.

Creating Realities

I'm trying to bring together three or four thoughts at once here, so let's just say this is a light jaunt through the nature of reality as a growing accretion of simulacra, and an attempt to find the true meaning behind mediated reality. I learned in philsophy that there is no unmediated reality, and so the question I would like to ask you is, who or what is mediating the particular reality you find yourself in?

I sent out an email link to some friends this week, in which the author asserts that President Obama has stopped using the word "we" in his speeches and has begun to use the word "I" to begin sentences, assert his will, and claim dominion of various parts of the govenrment apparatus. Not to make too much of a fuss about an email, or besmirch my rogues' gallery, but the response was briefly "meh..." The point I was trying to make was not, Oh dear, look at the language on this guy, but that language shapes our reality, and even the substitution of a single-syllable word can serve as the fulcrum upon which our world turns. Furthermore, there is every reason to analyze and attempt to triangulate the purpose of everything Obama says, because as with any political figure, his words and actions have a very unique set of motivations that bear looking at. Reality is not as it appears, but it is changing in very specific ways, and only by observing the changes can we attempt to decode what is actually happening beneath our perception of things.

This week I am reading Halting State, a novel by Charles Stross, in which the world has become hooked into the ubiquitous Internet, served on high-res displays inside eyeglasses and mediated by phones, which in 2017 are the primary components of worldwide distributed networks. Much of the populace are engaged in several layers of augmnented reality at any given time, including massively persistent worlds thast exist in parallel with our own. One of the three protagonists enters a gaming convention and instantiates all his realities at once, superimposed on each other, and views goblins conversing with spacemen and secret agents dickering with Cthulan horrors. In this reality, the banks which control in-game possessions and harness liquidity are managed by real-life financial concerns, and a heist of in-game loot constitutes a very serious threat of economic stability. Clearly, this world is only a few steps beyond our own in terms of its commitment to artifical worlds, and we are rapidly heading in that direction. Another protagonist, a police detective, lives with her glasses projecting CopSpace on top of her daily world: floating beacons, indications of crimes in progress, threat analysis, and constant communication between members of the force. These are realities that are being constructed even now, as Great Britain last year claimed to have created the world's first technological panopticon. (I am still looking for a link on this story.)

The next thing that piqued my interest came just an hour ago, in the form of an essay I've been looking for for some time. Titled How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, by Philip K. Dick, he begins by talking about the craft of writing but then widens his scope to the creation of the universe by God, whose mind may be synonymous with the universe itself. He reaches this territory by telling the story of writing "Flow My Tears the Policeman Said," which was recounted by Richard Linklater in Waking Life. It's a fascinating story, and like Linklater I don't know if he reached the final, unmediated conclusion, but I think it's something everyone has to experience it themselves. It goes into the realms of synchronicity, and if you've ever spent any time thinking about 11:11, the numbers 42, 5, 23, or the shamanic journey, you'll recognize the gist of the idea at once. Everything is now. All this has happened before, and it will all happen again. All of us travel inside God's channel. As I said to Berman last week,
"Reality is thermoplastic."

While I was composing this article, the words "Quantum Jumping: Traveling Alternate Realities" came up in Google Ads. I'm also hoping that one of these guys has something to say on the subject. In the meantime, I'm always looking for suggestions on which world to visit next.

It will have been important to have this

This will be needed in the past.

some people i would like to meet

Of all the people listed as guests for Jon Favreau's Dinner for Five, there are very, very few that I wouldn't love to sit down and have a meal with. I have only seen the Stan Lee/Kevin Smith/Jason Lee/Mark Hamill/JJ Abrams episode, so I need to get cracking. Luckily, they are available on Netflix Watch Now and tv.com.