Updates on the Matrix game:

Following updates carefully hosted by the fine Underscore: Leo Kane, Wongmo, and Fiona Leiphe. All three are healers with a spiritual cast. Wongmo's page recalls the utopian island feel of Aquapolis - he's also a coppertop manager to be:
Wongmo can clear your blocked energy fields and energy bodies, helping to release stagnating energy within you... Think of yourself as the ghost in the machine, the ethereal locked in the flesh... Wongmo has big plans for you!
Leiphe, an advocate of
therapeutic blogging. Her description is this sounds a lot like the Matrix future of human batteries:
[blogging] journaling will give you an outlet for your emotions, which you probably bottle up inside in order to grease the wheels of society... Removing the filter of the brain from between heart and keyboard is vital to tapping the Self. [em added]
Connections between the three: all are new-age-y healing types.
Leo Kane and
Wongmo, Hawaii and island language (recalling
Huxley's
Island?);
Kane likes Wongmo; also mind-body connections.
Timeline:
Wongmo's retreat started today.
Connections with the game's world: Kane
publishes in
Paranormal Research Journal, which we first saw by
Beth McConnell's interest.
Wongmo's
students are onto something: one painted what looks like a
battle between machines and organics (by "Gunther Z"; spouse of Kane's Mrs. Z?), while another shows a blue person, like Frankenstein's monster,
looking sadly at a brain within its fist.
Speaking of pictures, another one: castle (.bmp).
A page in a directory within Beth's site, http://mail.little-boxes.net/, mirrors She Is Missing. The woman pictured doesn't look like Beth's snapshot from the MetaCortex hompage - who is she? Conspiracy suggests Katherine Cunningham.
I applied to be a betatester for the VR tool. In the first wave of coppertops!
A note on timing and this narrative form: the tempo of narrative details is driven intersubjectively, by the intersection of one's own interventions (downloading, browsing, posting), others' (the same, but much greater in the aggregate), and the actions and manifestations of the design team. This resembles a serial form (magazine, tv, Flash Gordon), but is uneven, lacking a clear (and marketed) timetable. This has much in common with the user-driven narrative formed by any ergodic text, but without the full creative power - i.e., I can add to the collective experience by posting and puzzling, but can't alter the prime materials. Indeed, we could think of this form as a historical narrative, where the players are historiographers, discovering, selecting and commenting on primary materials.
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