There is No Pizza on Luna

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 17:31:23 GMT

I wonder if the feline minorities of the NPOL world would feel the same way about 20th-century anime that modern African-Americans feel about Amos and Andy? I think I might have Mister_Wolf and Postrodent help me come up with a really, really "specist" logo for a Terran sports team -- the "Yokohama Nekomimi" or something. :)

Issue 1, Pages 1 - 4 (first draft)

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 21:42:37 GMT

Page One
Panel 1:
Shot of transit station; tiny and cramped but imposing, with obvious infrastructure integrated into the architecture for maximum efficiency; "whimsically sterile"; entire walls are covered with monitors, half-height cubicles are stacked atop each other with an almost Escheresque compactness and regularity; citizens match the decor, very similar somatotypes but with fur in wildly different shades from blue-green to violet-blue; they wear lots of functional but expression accessories like antenna amplifiers, high-fashion spex, bioware facepaint, plastic clothing in neo-Mod styles (see No One Lives Forever and the "Two-Tone" record logo); Haruki is in the crowd somewhere, climbing up to the door of an office

Panel 2:
Haruki grooms himself in a reflective panel, in a vain (read: "gay") fashion outside the office; he's actually a little anxious; perhaps he mutters something about being early

Panel 3:
small, cozy office (w/glass walls?), decorated like the swingin'est psychiatrist in Paris 1968. Lots of psychedelia on the walls, but most of it is actually perfectly functional -- imagine an alternate psychiatric discipline from a non-prohibitionist society, descended from 1960s humanistic psych. The counselor is a female mooncat, appearing upper-middle aged. She has an eccentric "hip mama" sort of look, or perhaps an endearingly crazy aunt: serious, serene, imperturbable but also sympathetic and somewhat mischievous.

Counselor: "You're a little early, Haruki."

Panel 4:
Haruki settles into an egg chair, facing across from the counselor. Between them is an absurdly tiny table of a highly ergonomic design, perhaps even gelatinous. He plugs himself into some cords on the chair, at least one going to his wristcuff, emphasizing that this society isn't shy about machine/person boundaries. The Counselor is already plugged in.

Haruki: "There isn't much to do at the station."

Panel 5:
Haruki's full name, "Haruki Blue-452" appears on the counselor's data interface, along with some numbers and charts.

C: "It's fine. Your exit visa has been approved, of course. You passed the Terran language and culture modules quite handily, though we're still concerned about your socialization profile."

Panel 6:
Counselor gives Haruki a peculiar look.

C: "And you DO need to fill in the 'motive' section of the application. Last chance. It may just be a formality to you, but we can't judge the success of a citizen exchange without it. Last chance."

Page Two
Panel 1:
Haruki smiles, baring a bit of fang. He looks a little resentful of the intrusion, but takes it as a shared joke with the counselor.

H: "Spite."

Panel 2:
Counselor smirks and regards her screen, not unamused.

C: "You know we can't accept that. We'll just say... 'anthropological interest.'"

Panel 3:
Haruki grins, meekly but unrepentantly.

H: "That's probably for the best. Sorry."

Panel 4:
Counselor unplugs from her console for a minute.

C: "It's fine. Off the record, you're not the first applicant who just wanted to see the Terrans compete themselves into oblivion."

Panel 5:
Haruki lowers his head, now looking chastized.

H: "I know."

Panel 6:

C: (as she moves to re-interface) "You're the first whose application has passed. We hope this will be a fulfilling experience for you."

Page Three
Panel 1:
Haruki looks up a bit, reassured. Cocky though he is, Lunarian gerontocracy brings out the kitten in him.

H: "So it's all right? The elevator suite..."

(Haruki is not being evasive or nervous. I'm trying to emulate the indirection of Japanese spoken language.)

Panel 2:
Counselor does something "authoritarive-looking" with her data screen.

C: "Yes, the full visa package should be entering your bloodstream at any moment, plus a little appetite enhancer. You have a non-compliant streak on your nutritional records, but that will end shortly."

Panel 3:
Haruki facepalms, now clearly a little shaken, but not too self-conscious to show it. Like every Lunarian, he's been talking to counselors like this all his life.

C: (sympathetically) "It gets worse, Citizen. Your request for solo travel was disapproved."

Panel 4:
Haruki looks up, alarmed.

H: "What? But I thought I was the only Lunar citizen approved for this trip!"

C: "You were, and still are."

Panel 5:

C: (patiently) "But your case is unusual. You're very young for solo interspecies contact, you've never left Mother Luna's teats in your life, you have no specific academic or diplomatic mission..."

Panel 6:

H: (interrupting, hotly) "If you're saying I have to bring a chaperone, I'd just as soon not go."

C: "...you have unresolved anger and depressive tendencies."

Page Four
Panel 1:
Counselor adjusts Haruki's neurochemical profile through her interface, calming him.

C: (commandingly/invokingly) "Relax, Haruki."

Panel 2:
Haruki slumps backward in his chair as if scruffed, held up mostly by the wires plugged into him.

C: (ominously) "We just don't want you to be alone."

Panel 3:
Haruki is left adrift for a moment, half-lidded, while Counselor unplugs herself.

H: "Yes, that's good thinking. It's a good thought..."

Panel 4:
Counselor reaches forward and unplugs Haruki.

C: (with a clinician's wry detachment) "That's better. Let's get you and her on your way. The elevator drops in 4800 seconds."

Panel 5:
Haruki becomes alert with a sudden start, as if he'd just been daydreaming.

H: "Ooh. Um, ah, I guess we should."

Panel 6:
Haruki follows Counselor up through a crawlspace corridor. Lunar architecture is optimized for feline flexibility and indifference to heights, so walkways and stairways tend to go in odd directions, far above ground. It's a bit reminiscent of those Sharper Image three-story highrise cat cages.

Comic Book: First Five Issues

Wed, 28 May 2003 00:44:53 GMT

[note to self: add 1-2 subplots for each of these]
#1: Haruki gets a travel permit from Luna and gets stuck on Terra by a diplomatic incident. He tries to find a place to live and has his first run-in with the Plexicols and Terra's bizarre transmodern economy.

#2: Haruki consults with a suspiciously hierophant-like financial consultant who helps him navigate the arcane, unknowable rules of Plexicol finance. She recommends he try freelance work and refers him to Holotron, the Plexicol in charge of all entertainment and academic transactions.

#3: Haruki tries out for a role as a metagamer, finding the whole practice of deliberately induced recreational crises to be bizarre, frivolous and alien. He aces the tryout for unique reasons nobody yet perceives, and his manager lectures him with her theories about the social utility of the metagames.

#4: Haruki goes out on his first metagame mission, against a plague of zombies representing basic survival and life/death anxiety. (i.e. Maszlo level 1) This is a surreal experience for Haruki, because dead bodies on Luna are immediately and conscientiously memorialized and recycled...

#5: Haruki's second mission will be against a metavore that plays upon anxieties about air and breathing -- perhaps some sort of Don DeLillo-esque killer fog? Meanwhile, Haruki "wins" Alba as some sort of in-game reward, as something like the pets in Nethack...

Comic Book: Notes 3

Wed, 28 May 2003 00:27:47 GMT

The Holotron building should have an eldritch, secretive, Black Lodge sort of feel.

Haruki's Lunarian nature should give him some sort of edge in dealing with metavores. He will lose his job for a while because of this, just before the finale.

The distinction between the Plexicols and Haruki's society is that Luna's socialist "bureaucracy" is not impersonal. All citizens are highly engaged at every level, as a matter of both culture and compulsory civic duty. The Terran system is "voluntary" and decentralized, but totally depersonalized, prohibitively difficult to change, and opaque to most citizens.

Exploit the voodoo-like, arbitrary nature of modern post-industrial capitalism. The transmodern economy should not function by rules knowable to the average citizen. They're so complex and abstract, they can only be understood intuitively or by very highly trained experts. This puts economics even closer to the realm of religion...

There's a subculture of metagamers who, like Haruki later in the series, have been "disappeared" by a system glitch that gets them mistaken for defeated metavores. They've evolved a culture of their own that is completely, ingeniously devoid of abstractions, a third alternative to Lunarian and Terran society, free of linguistic "poisoning," bordering on a new form of consciousness barely comprehensible to outsiders.

The rest of society has noticed the disappearance of some of its metagamers. People are aware that metagame technology is capable of making people disappear, and they realize that some such people may walk among them, but they're resigned to never being able to find these people since by default they're unfindable. This could be made an allegory of why a cultural fringe is useful -- fringe groups might have an economic niche devoted exclusively to experimenting with recovering these "lost" people.

What is the scope of each metavore's threat? Citywide? Worldwide? Streetwide? How many direct competitors does Haruki have? Are there many threats at various Mazslovian levels, or is Haruki working through them like a class/level system? Do people know openly that the metavores are assigned Mazslo's hierarchy levels, or is this just an unspoken theme?

The metavores are tulpa-like, reacting in an unpredictable feedback loop to people's responses to them. The population is aware it's being manipulated but can never be sure where or how -- that's part of the fun!

Metavores should be subtle, eerie, conspiratorial... Think of Buffy, and how the various supernatural Bads are all allegorical of teenager problems.

Comic Book: Notes 2

Sun, 25 May 2003 17:02:52 GMT

The metavores (the semi-virtual enemies that Haruki fights) are able to create physical forms, as incarnate "roles" like Alba, but mostly they just exist as urban legends, pre-sentient algorithms that express themselves inside and through popular culture. They begin as pretty mundane -- just reflections of ordinary daily life and anxieties about survival and sex and food and families and money. As the series progresses and the end nears, though, they creep up Maszlo's Hierarchy and start basing themselves (they're written by pooled AI intelligence, not by conscious human choice, so they just seem to "emerge" from the data gathered -- highlight difference between a style of thought driven by desires, and one that was engineered from the start not to have survival needs) on more abstract fears and hopes like love, alienation, identity, sanity, spirituality. Ultimately, they'll get to be more and more like Doom Patrol villains, gifted with the ability to break down people's realities -- even in ways NOT explained by previously descriptions of how metavores work.

In one episode, Haruki somehow, in the process of destroying a metavore, gets himself written out of the collective consciousness. He becomes a purely concrete being with no abstract layer overlaying him, totally societally invisible -- and his physical environment has been so overwhelmed by "creeping surrealism" and abstraction that he has trouble getting basic living necessities, since almost all food and water requires interaction with some kind of system of symbols and social states. Nothing but the natural world works for him -- and he might be forced to flee to whatever natural environment remains on Terra. In the meantime, Alba is endangered by his "disappearance" and there's little he can do about it...

Remember, you can only write what you know. Heroic James-Bondian action sequences will probably always escape you, because you know nothing about guns and tactics and vehicles. Therefore, turn this into a strength and gear Haruki's adventures towards problems you do know how to solve, like interpersonal disputes, problems of language and symbolism, and political agitation. The script should read something like an action movie adaptation of Temporary Autonomous Zone, with a screenwriting credit for Patrick Farley.

Borrow something from Portal's replacement of biological viruses with genetic viruses. The major "health" threats in Haruki's world are memetic and psychological, even if they still have biological components. For example, there should be common species of parasites that use easily exploitable glitches in human behavior, like pleasure or the fight-flight reflex, to serve their own survival needs. Though they should be a naturally arising consequence of the 30th century environment somehow, the Holotron Plexicol should use "tame" ones as part of their technology for inducing mass altered states of consciousness.

Comic Book: Notes 1

Sun, 25 May 2003 15:57:09 GMT

Society is a satire of hyperindividualism. There's huge power in everyone's hands, but no social cohesion, shared values, or communal effort whatsoever. Total spiritual entropy. People are now working for totally autonomous, unmanned political and economic structures that produce nothing and exist purely to sustain themselves. These organizations' influence over people is totally abstract, artificial, and psychological -- they expertly push their pleasure buttons and stroke their egos in exchange for membership, consumership, and labor. Families are totally disintegrated and aloof, kids are raised by contract and emancipated at five. This is a society of gods on leashes.

The above autonomous, presentient, unmanned institutions are called "plexicals" and they form the backbone of 30th century infrastructure. They have totally alien, almost Lovecraftian minds and are not self-aware in a recognizeable human sense. They lack human personality and speech capacity because they are not biological. They communicate almost entirely in rules, results, behavioral cues, media outbursts (cut-ups?), and information.

Be wary of letting Alba's relationship with Haruki seem sexist -- keep in mind she's the practical, ambitious, mechanically inclined, assertive one, and is easily his intellectual equal, even if she is a "pet." This is a big chance to demonstrate that submission != inferiority.

Strictly speaking, Alba is "fair game." She's a game construct and has no more civil rights than a set of Quake-model polygons. Alba is composed of something other than ordinary flesh, perhaps some sort of artificial biomaterial that's based on an alternative to DNA? Try to avoid Blade Runner cliches here. Instead, use her as a metaphor for people who live healthy but illegal lifestyles.

In an early conversation, Haruki is faced with some sort of minor problem -- a bill, a piece of paperwork, a transportation need. He's dismayed and annoyed to find that there's no community support structure on Terra -- no government programs, no communes, no free hoverbuses, maybe not even traffic signals or publically owned streets.

Haruki gradually meets people from Terra's guerrilla ontologist community, various day-glo culture freak types. Emphasize that these people do not and probably could not exist on Luna. Also make it clear that they are not heroes but they are a positive and healthy consequence of Terra's ambitious hyperindividualism -- i.e., they're not living apart from mainstream Terran society. Question the idea of the mainstream -- make most of these "freaks" respected, trained, licensed professionals. Mood engineers, spirituality resellers, professional oracles, executive Otherkin, stock analysts who play the gender market, monasticized orders of performance artists with life-long scripts, metareality TV producers (like Haruki's bosses, who should actually be pretty cool guys), nomadic game designers (shoutout to Tamaghaz folks), collective memory sysops. In particular, make the most of the idea that this society has a Ribofunk-like understanding of the chemical, cybernetic/informational, and metaphysical basis of moods and thought. Sharing a unique experience or paradigm to somebody should not only be a technical/artistic possibility, it should be a teachable and well-compensated skill...

Imply that Terra's decentralized, desocialized culture has evolved some transmodernist, chaos-system based substitutes for old functions of society, and that this has both good and bad consequences. Ideally, the whole series should be readable as both a fluorescent manifesto and a repudiation of the founding ideas of fluorescence.

Comic Notes: Exposition

Sun, 25 May 2003 14:07:41 GMT

This is a possible expository panel for the first page:

"In the mid-24th century, a race of humanoid cats is engineered to colonize the moon. They are chosen only because a quirk of civil rights law makes them disposable. Their descendants thrive, creating a communalistic society that is stable and humane, though not particularly powerful or innovative.

Now, at the eve of the Third Millennium, a mooncat named Haruki visits Terra to revel in the final entropic death of post-human culture. He is not the first to make this pilgrimate but, thanks to some choice words between Terran and Lunar diplomats the previous week, he may be the last. Unable to find passage back to Luna, he takes a job as a media analyst -- the only freelance job left on planet Earth."

Comic Notes: Themes

Sun, 25 May 2003 13:49:40 GMT

What happens when you're told to prepare for an event that resembles nothing you've ever experienced before? What if it resembles nothing anybody's ever experienced? How will you react? How will society at large react? What happens if your assumptions are totally different from theirs? Whose will win out, and why? If nobody has any more real information than anybody else, what do people's assumptions say about them?

Can a culture really die out? What would the warning signs of "old age" be? Will a culture inevitably spawn successors, or is it possible for culture to reach an entropic state long before the bodies and minds that inhabit it? What would an entropic culture look like? Could this be related somehow to Buddhist and Hindu concepts about "final ages" and religion as a look at the energy state of the universe? What if that entropy could be artificially accelerated or decelerated? What if it were to become profitable for somebody to do so? Will a devoted enough individualist even exploit meaning itself for personal gain?

Is it really true that a world without strife would be a world without advancement or meaning? Would a utopia inevitably degenerate into stagnation or boredom, without any monsters to slay? Is the awareness of pain really necessary in order to recognize pleasure? Do empathy and bliss have positive social functions? What happens when you take paradigms of cooperation and competition to extremes?

How clear is the line between reality and fantasy? To what extent is each shaped by society and authority, and to what extent are they chosen by the individual? Can these extents be changed? If so, is there any way to deliberately increase or decrease the role of society in creating people's minds and defining their choices? What are the consequences of either extreme?

Comic Notes: Characters

Fri, 23 May 2003 01:07:45 GMT

Haruki Blue-452: (Bonus points to anybody who gets the 80's pop music reference there. :) )
Sexy Thomas Dolby-lookin' nerdboy with wire-frame glasses, plastic neo-Mod clothing, and a hypnoray. An anti-noir detective, idealistic and sensitive, more Tom Baker or Ragged Robin than Humphrey Bogart. Smug, slightly spoiled, hedonistic, but with a sense he's better than his surroundings, and a moral code to match. Embodiment of fluorescent strengths and weaknesses: ingenious, caring, non-conformist, naive, distractable, temperamental. Should have at least one virtue or personality trait only expressive in native Lunarian language. Very introverted. Meticulous, nearly prissy. Utter pacifist towards real people. Quietly prides self on always using minimal necessary force.

Alba Green-316:
Haruki's ward and eventual lover, a hyperreal day-glo bunnygirl adopted from a dying metavore in a scientist's role. Posterbunny for respectful, loving owner-pet relationships. (Haruki should be uncomfortable with "owning" another sentient being, but be socially obliged to it.) Sheltered, relentlessly inquisitive and determined to catch up with the real world. Foil to Haruki's smug moral certitude -- asks a lot of uncomfortable questions. Mechanically inclined, perhaps a genius. Trickster archetype, gradually developing a wry, wicked sense of humor. Extremely low pain threshold, because she's never been exposed to it before. Fearless, for same reason. Odd gaps in her cultural knowledge. No understanding of prescriptive morality, poor understanding of consequences. A little geeky, left-brained, practical, literal-minded. Odd hyperreal abilities.

Comic Notes: Premise

Fri, 23 May 2003 00:54:47 GMT

Haruki is a bishounen kitty-boy media star. He comes from a lunar colony governed by prudent social democracy, and only came to Earth to gloat in its deterioration first-hand. Instead, he's found a job with a company that produces an instantiator-based MMORPG that occasionally secretes charactes into reality amid huge publicity. The simulacra never do any direct damage, but they seem to induce some sort of disruptive electrohypnotic mass hysteria. Haruki fights these creations because it's the only freelance job still available on Terra.

SERIES ARC:
As Haruki's fame grows, his life becomes more artificial and surreal. He makes decisions that only make sense on a dramatic level, his friends suddenly and inexplicably become more mediagenic overnight, as if they'd been recast with new actors to please an audience -- and he's the only one who notices, and people stop talking about ordinary everyday things. Meanwhile, there are less and less of the "metavore" media construct bosses to fight each day. Haruki's savings are dwindling while his useless fame increases. There's a rising sense of apocalyptic fervor across the Earth. And Haruki's employers are beginning to consider a lunar franchise once Terran culture's been rendered too entropic to sustain a profit. Only Haruki is coming to suspect that the reason the world seems to be ending is that his bosses succeeded long ago, Earth has been converted entirely to a fiction, and the last episode is coming soon...

General notepad entry

Mon, 05 May 2003 19:50:27 GMT

Civil defense sphinxes.

Wandering the country after a technological apocalypse that destroys all the higher human affective capacities (love, empathy, aesthetics, joy, spirituality, altruism, neophilia, curiosity), in search of a single living companion.

A "brain hopper" module that constantly reminds people of spiritual things -- that artifically coaches those genetically consigned to being Semiotically Stupid in fluorescent thought and explosive symbolism, in a society where fluorescence is a basic survival trait.

Reverse haunted house story, about a radiant spirit that gets trapped in the sinister banality of an ordinary suburban home.

Pakula-esque paranoid political thriller set in an urban fantasy world with fae and shapeshifters

Psychological tension between only two lucid people in a roomful of people who have been rendered automatons through hypnosis, possession, or some such -- there is something tempting further in the room, and the one in power tells the visitor that they must also surrender their will to enter

If there is something fundamentally irrational or meaningless or eldritch in the universe, there is no guarantee that we are capable of perceiving it. There could be something horribly awry in the fabric of reality, and there is no guarantee whatsoever that we know about it. There could be a war between sense and nonsense at every level of existence, and our entire universe might just be a local consequence of a nonsense victory. Having no basis for comparison to what is "fair" or "sane" or "logical," we could be stuck in a system that guarantees meaninglessness and doom -- and what, if not that, is entropy? -- while there's another one right next door that's in perfect, fertile, ecstatic harmony. As a matter of fact, either could be transformed into the other if the perceptions of its inhabitants were sufficiently twisted or sufficiently limited. This, of course, means, that a twist in a mind is every bit as important as a twist in the fabric of time, of only so on a local level -- but what if BILLIONS of minds were twisted?

Give the "City Come a-Walkin'" treatment to corporations and government institutions. How would Microsoft behave if it were a single person, making decisions about small-scale daily life?

"exploding situation trees"

wire-frame Buddhas