Infinite Questions, Finite Answers

How can we truly understand infinity? What can you say you know that goes on for ever and ever and never ends? The world? It was once formed from a cloud of interstellar dust, and it wasn't a world then. And while it has lived - is living - it will have to die eventually and return to the pile of dust it once was.

Time? Time is a human concept. We decided how long a second should last, a minute, an hour, a year. And even then these minutes, these seconds have only been passing since we decided they existed and we are the ones who have imposed time back to the start of the universe.

Start. If infinity truly existed, there would be no place in our vocabulary for the word start, nor for the word end.

I have heard some people say that emotions are infinite, and they give rise to human creativity. That there is a never ending circle of life and death, children being born and people dying. None of these things are infinite. Not really. There was a first life, a single celled organism. When and where I don't know. There was a first human life too. Or rather a first germ-line mutation that led to Homo sapiens sapiens. And the answer to when that was haunts a lot of people. And eventually, who knows when, who knows where, there will be a final human life. Either through extinction or evolution, but it will happen. And when we die, so will our creativity. Our love, our hatred, our laughter and our tears. No. None of these are infinite. The life span of the human race is fleeting. The length of a life of an individual even more so. And this is a good thing, because our minds and our hearts are only equipped to deal with the finite.

Not even the universe is infinite, it has to end and it has to start somewhere and somewhen. And even if you believe in the big-bang-big-squish theory, when was the first bang? When will be the final squish?

Everything comes down to circles in the end. Nature likes circles and they fascinate us as well. And a circle shows, at least to my mind, the closest thing to infinity. Ever seen a Möbius strip? Follow it which ever way you will, it has only one side. Your finger tracing a side is inside, and then outside and then inside again. But even this is finite. For the infinity, the foreverness is trapped within this single piece of paper which itself is trapped within the world that we see and know. And how can something that ends hold something that doesn't?

As a human being, I look at the world from within the laws of finity. And to be honest, that sits a whole lot better than the concept of existing without end ever will. It scares me a little. Because to never end, it has to never grow or develop, and that leads to stagnation. I have never found something that I want to keep exactly as it is. Things need to grow and change, or else they wither and die. Even love. I love my parents dearly. I always have done and I always will do. But the love I feel for them now is different to that I felt when I was three, or ten, or will feel when I am thirty. Because it has grown with me. It has changed, and ended and started again in a different shape. It may have done it so gradually so as to fool you into thinking it was one continuous never ending thing, but it has changed, and it is different.

Infinity is one of those questions that will always be at the back of my mind, along with a few others, like, why do we use the word blue to describe the colour blue? When was it decided that that particular syllable(s) - blue, bleu, azule - was the right word to show what it was? I suspect that these questions will always muse in the back of my mind, never to be answered. But that's aright. Because by putting the concept never on it gives it a finite value, a 0 instead of a maybe that would otherwise be the case.

Still. The question remains. How can we truly understand infinity?

Froth Froth Froth

A fair bit of prior warning to people. This post is entirely to satisfy my LARP froth. LARP = Live Action RolePlay. Live Action RolePlay = win. Epic, epic win.

I mentioned in an earlier post something called LARP. I may have mentioned it in more than one earlier post, but since they are coming up to 'bout a year old now, there isn't much chance I'll remember, given my track record.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, I went to my first truly big LARP event. I've not talked about it sooner because, well, you know how it is. Revision yadda yadda, exams yadda yadda... You know, just the entire reason I'm visiting the great northern wilderness for.

Anyway, I went to Wigan for one of the big CP events, one that is held there every year. I am now going to sum it up in 10 words. No particular order I hasten to add. just, the words that say it the most to me, as a complete newcomer.

1. Mud. Soo, soo much mud. I lost my boot in the mud whilst cooking bacon. EVERY morning.

2. Rain. I have been assured that it usually pelts it down at Wigan and this year was no exception. Although there was enough sun to get sunburned. Go figure.

3. Bacon. I have come to the conclusion that LARPers Aren't actually entirely human. They can apparantly live off bacon alone. They seem to be some sort of half carnivore, half machine construct.

4. Kit. Ranging from the ooohhh my word Iwoot to good grief, is that for real? mostly Iwoot though. Shiny shiny kit. Weapons and shields and bottles and bags and uuuummmmm LARP shinies.

5. Tents. Some beautiful IC ones and some funky (and huge, and tiny, and colourful...) OC ones. Having to take off boots before I could crawl into the tent was fun too. I had to hang my socks out to dry.

6. Roleplay. Done live style. No dice for these hard core members of the gaming community. I saw things that genuinely moved me that weekend.

7. Battles. Epic, EPIC battles. Both observed and participated in. Watching you could see patterns and where these pattens broke up and where people when down. Participating in them? Chaos. Amazing chaos. You are focused on the person in front of you, the one who is trying to hit you. If you're lucky, then they go away and there is another person in front of you. If not then you go away and there is another person in front of them.

8. Death. Most notably to me, my own death. And funeral. and standing down ceremony. I cried. Blubbed like a baby. You forget the outside world to that level. It's pretty immense. And intense.

9. Monstering. An uber uber uber part of the weekend. A chance to let your character rest a little and play something else. An angry cripple, a vengeful goblin, an upset ogre. Doesn't matter if you die. Coz, you know, monsters can respawn. Monstering is so so much fun. A chance to just let yourself go.

10. Refs. White tabbards, hi-vis vests, paggering :p They kinda make it work. they stand there, looking a bit out of place if they have the high-viz vests on, they make up the monsters and get them to where they're going and telling them what they need to do. I liked the refs I met. They were geekier than I was.

Well, the explanations there make it slightly more than ten words, but take the first word of every point and then the rest as a sub-vocal blurb. THEN it works.

The entire weekend remains as a series of snapshots. The frying pan, the standpipe with it's lack of a drain, Gate guard, the alchemists meeting, Water carrying for the monsters and then dying because of the monsters. Dying, and the funeral, that bit is fairly clear. Strong emotions attached I guess. And the OC tent. Thinking I had broken the zip, fixing it. breaking the zip on mine and then another sleeping bag. Lord knows what I would have done had the event been any longer. And then packing up. That bit was rather busy and then the journey home? I didn't even get out of Wigan before I was asleep.

All in all, it was one of the most amazing weekends I've had in a long while, to the point I'm still frothing about it on a near daily, if not daily basis. Leek is next. I want! I want NOW.

I'm sorry the formatting is so dense folks. apparently, it doesn't want to do what I'm telling the computer to do. I'll see if I can fiddle with it when I'm back on my machine, and back in FireFox. Also, sleepies and lack of spacing means that there ARE mistakes in there. I just hope I caught most of them.

Late Nights and Labyrinths.

I'm sat on a bed in my friend's room, whilst both friends are asleep on the bed, with the Labyrinth on in the background- Bowie for the win. Just for the hair- and for the first time in months I'm not aching all over. Codeine really is a blessing in disguise. N.B. apparently, they're not asleep, muttered comments about well, yes, about 42 must be kept to myself in the future.


Where does inspiration come from? From the heavens? From beyond that, beyond the universe? Is it a tangible thing, or is it like a shadow on a cloudy day? Or is it the pattern of light hiding in the water and throwing sparkles up on your wall?

It's different for everyone. They say Newton got his inspiration from an apple, a physical thing, and Archimedes found his in the bath. I do a lot of my good work at night, in the small hours of the morning, like now in fact. Things drift to me on the night, 'soft as velvet, dark as sin'. I must admit, when there is light around, I am usually more concerned with wanting to be elsewhere, namely out in the light, enjoying it. I don't do that enough regrettably. Not enjoying it for it's own sake.

Moods play a big part, well of course they do really. If you have lost someone, you want to write something to remember them by, if you have just had the best day of your life then things will naturally be a lot more exuberant than it would be in another case. (the birds are singing now. Its times like this when I could almost forget that I am in a small room in a huge student estate, surrounded by people.)

I find that most ideas come to me in the small of the night because by that point I have had a fairly full day, and my body is accustomed to earlyish nights. So by three or four in the morning I am at that point where I am half asleep, half meditating, and because I'm not chasing ideas down they can form naturally. Do you find that? The more you try to force an idea, the less it works or works well?

But once that idea is there, and has been left to brew for a while, then it works and that is the point you can push it along and cause it to have a more structured shape, to make it work for you, If you're really lucky, it turns out to be a fantastic idea, not simply a good one and the writing seems to write itself. (If you had seen that last paragraph unedited, you would be able to tell when it is being written: It had lost all attempts at sentence structure and grammar. Which is a pity, me being a fair bit of a grammar nazi.)

Looking at some of the wonderful pieces of art, be it a painting, a sculpture, a book, or even an inspired piece of research it's hard to believe that it is all due to a chaotic connection of nerves in someones brain. And that leads to the thought of is there outside help? is there something giving us ideas and thoughts, and if so, are they tangible to them?

I can imagine it wouldn't be a glamorous job, not at all, I can envision an open office plan building, with a typical office warren made of noticeboards for walls and pictured of the wife or the dog on the desk, with those awful inspirational calenders that seem to find their way into every office environment of this type, with thousands upon thousands of workers, all at their desks, filling out forms on old clunky computers that don't work very well any more.

'Oh hell, I've got another P189. Lord but there are a lot of them going around at the minute, production must be trying to fill a quota, although why they want yet another bad lesbian porn manga, I'll never understand.' And: ' Arrrrrrrggh that stupid computer has crashed AGAIN, all this last week's work was on that. I'll never get that production bonus if this carries on, tech support promised me this wouldn't happen again, PROMISED!'

If it is like that, then I think that I would rather prefer that it was random mis-firings of neurones. Because lets face it, the normal neurons would be concerned with keeping the body alive. Self preservation is a wonderful thing, and sometimes I think genius must run counter to that. 'The good die young.' Sure they do. Because they forget to do the normal things like eat and pay the bills so they have clean water and heating in the dead of winter and such.

I think that because it is now full light and I started this in full dark, and because the ramblings in my head, let alone on paper are starting to get increasingly disjointed, I will end this here, because I could go on for a long time and this is already of rather epic length. Good day.