Let’s see if I have this right :
We nerdy intellectual types get to be that way, in part, because we learn to tune out our emotions and instincts in order to focus on the voice of our intellect and follow it.
This makes us academically smart but emotionally dense because we have built a wall to keep our emotions out so we can continue to be “smart”.
This, in turn, means that ours is a much less emotionally rewarding world than the world of the mundanes. Very little of their world gets through to us. That’s why their world often baffles us with things like organized sports team fandom and small talk.
We just don’t get it. How can they enjoy something so intellectually unrewarding?
Which brings us to the real core of this discussion : it is the intellectually stimulating things which can make it through our wall and touch us emotionally, and that is so rare and wonderful to us that we end up growing extremely attached to it.
Basically. we build a big thick wall with a big thick gate that shut out almost everything, and then worship whatever manages to make it through.
Hence the large amount of emotion present in most fandoms. Our fandoms are a lot like religions to us. The characters are our demigods and our personal version of them and their settings and their lives are our religious dogma.
So when two fans are having a blazing row over what color Harry Potter’s first wand was or whether there’s such a thing as a midichlorian, the stakes are actually much higher than they appear as these things are articles of faith to these people.
And in case you’re inclined to look down on these people for putting so much energy and emotion into something so trivial, ask yourself is who was the greatest basketball player, or who that hourlong drama character should have gone with, or whether or not a hotdog is a sandwich really any more important?
Been pretty sleepy so far today.
Which means the “go right back to bed after I get up to pee” method works. I have been trying it out, which means overriding my tendency to avoid my bed for a while after I get up because of that period I mentioned before when I woke up agitated all the time and had to do something to expend the excess energy before I could sleep.
Additionally, I think part of me doesn’t want to return to bed when it’s still warm from my heat and wet from my sweat.
In a perfect world, I would have a series of identical bedrooms so I could go back to a nice totally fresh bed every time I got up to pee.
Back to the experiment. Going directly back to bed seems to have helped me to sleep better and sleep deeper.
Unfortunately, that also taps into my sleep debt. And it is long overdue.
So I have a lot of sleeping to do before I catch up again.
Speaking of which, time for me to lay back down again.
More after the break.
Burning through time
The greatship the Crippled Giant drifted slowly through space, blue fire flowing freely from the three great gouges some colossal forces had made in its bricklike form.
Even the most basic of scans would have revealed that it has been doing so for a very long time. All around the great plumes of flame lived many complex ecosystems that used the energy of the blue flames as the basis for countless metabolisms.
In one plume, a great sleepy space while turned and lolled lazily in the energy stream like it was nothing but a warm stream. Around it darted millions of much smaller variations on its own form serving it and in turn feeding off it as well.
They all were its children, given birth to and formed according to purpose and need. Some would clean the great bloated body, others would carefully adjust the great feeding gills that drank the energy stream and sifted advanced plasmas from it, still others scouted around the whale and fed the information to its mighty brain, and so on.
And when they had served their purpose, they simply fed themselves back to the might creature who spawned them, their substance to be formed anew in its service.
The second plume housed the machine people who, unbeknownst to them, were the progeny of the greatship’s monstrous AI, Knower, who had designed them and spawned them in hopes of repairing the damage to the ship, no matter how long it took.
But the damage was too great to be fixed in the handful of millennia before the Knower was driven hopelessly insane by instabilities in its core programming and cut off all contact with everything outside itself in fear of “alien influences”.
Without the Knower, the machine people soon lost all sense of purpose or drive, and were left to follow their rudimentary programming and build more of themselves and more of their great machines in which to work and live for its own sake.
Thus was born their intricate ersatz Dyson cylinder that enclosed nearly all of the second plume and turned the pillar of blue flame into the blazing sun of their new kingdom, and filled the interior walls of said cylinder with billions of machine people all striving towards something called the Great Repair – to what, none knew.
And finally, the third plume was host to the Phoenixes, creatures of whimsy and mirth made of nuclear fire, magnetic fields, and gossamer threads of time itself. Theirs was a peaceful existence of games, frolic, and sport, all accompanied by a constant chatter of conversation and the sharing of ideas.
The only flaw in their idyll was their own purposelessness. A terrible restlessness grew like shadows at sundown within their merry spirits, and every day, a few more of them were driven mad by it, and put behind the wall that had been constructed in a vain attempt to keep the madness from spreading.
The rest responded the only way they knew how : by throwing themselves into their games and discussions even more in hopes of using their energies up before they lost their minds and the shadow took over all of them.
Nobody knew what would happen then.
Nobody wanted to know.
So they danced and played and talked and invented and tried not to think about the doom they knew was coming but could not comprehend.
But what of the inside of the broken brick? Who lived there?
The humans, of course.
But that’s another tale entirely.
I will talk to you nice people again entirely.