Death is a video game’s way of telling you that you fell asleep at the wheel.
Feedback is what you get from my teaching games. I’ll explain: Yesterday was one of those intense days where everything happens all at once. I spent Thursday night working 8 1/2 hours straight through ’til breakfast on MAYA, which is slowly but surely getting ready for prime-time.
MAYA is a 3rd Person 3D Shooter with the emphasis on exploration and discovery, hampered by a constant barrage of rocks and other nasty projectiles originating with the many zombie personalities you’ll find so reminiscent of Planet Urth.
Tonight, if all goes well — and why should it all of a sudden go well??? — I’ll be finishing up the roster of zombies and zombie lords you’ll encounter in this quiet Mayan countryside brain-trainer.
As you play my “games”, please remember that they are NOT GAMES. They are properly called “serious games”, meaning that they are not entertainment and definitely not in any way frivolous.
The Orbs are intended as direct active spiritual instruction.
They are not now, and were never intended to, be electronic amusement parks or kid’s games.
I really am NOT here for your entertainment, and you’d better not, as the song says, mess with me tonight. I am Gorby, and in a cybernetic environment, I am almost invincible. Once in a while, I miss my footing or fail to dodge a rock or rocket launcher.
I don’t waste a single moment of my life grabbing every drop that falls in front of me, and neither should you. Life is far too short to drink social, sexual and psycho-emotional dramas, and this planet has plenty of personal drama to offer. I haven’t time for it, and if you’re really working to be in The Work, you won’t, either.
Bottom line, the real dangers are not in the shocking ambushes of the Bardo, but in the subtle seductions, step by step, until you’re in it too deep to pull back out. The answer is to outgrow those unproductive serial relationships, but most folks don’t, because they don’t see the need to outgrow anything.
My Ammy Inductions will address the issue of seduction, as well as many other issues that you face and with which you must do daily combat. Margaret Anderson, one of the Gurdjieff “Rope” folks, wrote a book titled “My 30 Years’ War”, detailing some of the hard issues she had to deal with inside herself.
Immaturity is the last refuge of the lazy. If you don’t put the energy in, nothing will change, and if you think you’ve already become an Ascended Master, you’ll have no chance whatever to work any change at all.
What do my Transformative Meta-Tools actually teach?
Nothing, if you think you’re already perfect. Depends on what you want to accomplish. In Maya, you will learn to make split-second decisions. You will learn to die gracefully, and to return consciously so you can continue your work with only a minimum of interruption.
In Dragon 3D, you’ll learn to see ahead without visual stimulation, to remember where things are, and what they are likely to do when you encounter them. You will become Maze-Bright in this wild adventure Orb, but even knowing what’s up ahead, you’ll never quite make every corner. Your event-memory skills will improve and, until they do improve, you’ll die at every turn.
In Dragon 3D, you will also learn to adjust your reaction to the level of threat, using no more energy than you need to, in order to accomplish your purpose. One more thing you might or might not learn in Dragon 3D is to make it all the way through without dying once. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of folks I know who might be able to zip through there without getting smashed up in the process.
If you’re very lucky, you’ll get good enough to do something that Kru and Grishy are easily able to do — get through the entire seven levels, with all seven bosses, without killing anyone. The environment is train-style, meaning direct path, no major turns. One hint in the dungeons is that the wooden floors are side-trips, where you can get more money, more life, more magic, but no armor.
Armor you have to buy from the merchants in the towns. There are seven towns, each of which features a dungeon of its own.
Total number of hours I have into Dragon 3D? Countless. I’ve just put in another 60 hours into it this week alone, and the work is intense, the concentration skills equally intense. It’s all about math, and it’s a very delicate balance-game, sort of like a Work-Life.
Ordinary life needs no skill, no prior experience and no attention level whatever to play, but it’s the same payoff every time — you hear the dance leader call, “change partners” and you’re on the carousel one more time. Gosh, isn’t that exciting!
Some folks think it is. Our whole culture is based on flirtation, seduction and domination; you can see this reflected in the social scenes from singles club Speed Dating of the present all the way to the cyber-dating that happens in Second Life, hopefully not within the borders of the Ashram, but pretty near everywhere else.
Mating and Dating is the energy source that drives the world. You can use it as an energy source, or get caught up in its power and drown in a pool of sweat.
Dragon 3D is the very first full 7 level “game” I made, back in 1987 on the Amiga Platform, written and tested on the Toshiba 1100 laptop, a very advanced and powerful computer for its day. It might well have been the big winner, except that Amiga went under without notice, leaving us in the position of having to start all over, which cost us a year, to get the GODD engine working in the newly developed PC Platform — at first, we were on floppy disk and DOS, but soon were able to make Windows work for us a little.
I had to have a laptop at that time. I was in traction for a back injury, immobilized for 8 months with a level of pain that you’d think was unbearable, and it was. I refuse to use pain-killers, and had to live with that misery for almost a year before I was able to get up and move around, at first only a few steps a day.
During that time, Dick (Val), Claude (Kru) and Barbara (Grishy) and I developed what would eventually be the very last of the “Indie” engines, the GODD Engine, which is all our own source code. We therefore own all the rights to our properties.
All the resources, sound and visuals, were made by Claude. Dick develops the engine every day; each day reveals new effects and new glitches that need fixing. Barbara does the proof-reading (writing a “game” is exactly like writing, except you’re working with a sort of 3-dimensional Adobe Photoshop, except that the image moves. There are movie-makers now that allow you to manipulate characters in this way; the earliest form of these movies is called “machinima”, but it’s developed into a marketing science now.
By the time the internet came along, in 1994, I was able to run around with the kids, but only in cyberspace. I had lost mobility, and was bedridden a total of 15 years until two operations put me back on my feet again, in 2001 and 2002.
Now fully recovered, I’m back in the Zen Garden and out in my used-brick Bonsai Patio creating wondrous and thoroughly gnarly bonsai out of quite ordinary-looking plants. I now have a wheeled weed-eater device that I can actually push around, clearing my brick paths that I laid down over a quarter of a century ago.
Yesterday, we had a meeting in the morning, at which we read an email and discussed some changes we’ll be making in the house related to the appraisal inspection.
After the meeting, I went quite early for a change, to see some hardware and paint things, before the art class. I knew I wouldn’t have time afterward.
It was a great class, one of the best I’ve done in the Friday morning art series. We had 11 people in the class, and I produced four 16″ x 20″ paintings illustrating various points of painting. There was one landscape, one still-life, one portrait and one abstract. I didn’t have a 5th canvas handy for the obvious figure painting, but it sufficed to get the ideas across. None of those are for sale; they’ll be preserved to be shown along with the DVD, when we have an art workshop.
I’ll be painting again, especially 16″ x 20″ landscapes and still-lifes, and putting them up for sale on eBay, along with anything else I happen to produce for sale, although most of my work is no longer offered for sale — I haven’t been producing much artwork in the past few years, because my energy has been going to the trainings.
I was able to do a little music, and worked out something I’ve been thinking about for a few weeks now; a possible FAXL arrangement for “Not-So-Sweet Martha Lorraine” by my old friend Country Joe MacDonald, who is the nephew of my longtime friend Sidney Plotnik — anyhow, we’ll sing it and play it, if we can manage the time-shifts.
The rest of the day was taken up with a number of admin issues addressing some of the changes going on here, not the least of which is the remodeling of the main house, the barn. Oh, yes, and the grannie house, which needs a total makeover.
I should mention that I spent the better part of an hour searching through an electronics parts place to try to find some wire for my newest mad-scientist invention, the Portable Ghost Radio. It uses a loop antenna, where the Dunwoody cannot.
The good news is, the Dunwoody is about the best you’ll find in an easy-to-make crystal radio kit at a price you can afford. To have the very best crystal set with the entire tuning rig and an effective worldwide antenna system, will set you back at least $3,000, and that’s if you do all the work yourself. It ain’t cheap to run a ham radio station.
And that’s why I chose the Dunwoody for your first time out. It’s cheap and easy.
Gosh, that sounds like some of the people I used to know. Anyhow, rest assured that Claude and Lance and a few real radio geeks and I are working on it, and we’ll have something for you by the Convention time for sure. One word of warning, though — we don’t know how much it will cost to build yet; hopefully we can keep the price down below the “alarm goes off, call my broker, call my banker, call my accountant” kinda price-tag we expect from this kind of very vintage gear.
Claude brought me back some soil samples from The Claim. I didn’t run the black sand myself, I sent it for a kind of bench-test assay, which I can’t do myself. The gold on the property runs at about 85% fine, which is very impressive.
As you know, our claim is to the East of the so-called “Jurassic Ledge”, which is where the major gold spill has been coming from for the past few years. If it were west of the ledge, we’d have paid more like $200,000 for the property, but it’d be patented claim, meaning we’d own the land and could build on it.
But think about digging, trommeling and panning that gritty soil year after year, season after season, working all day to make enough to make the claim pay back that almost quarter of a million dollars, and believe me, without working at it 8-10 hours a day, you couldn’t possibly get that much back out of it in a lifetime, let alone a year or two.
When it gets that serious, gold mining is no longer fun. It should never be about the money. There is gold on the gold claim. As a matter of fact, there has to be. The government doesn’t issue claims unless the property is assayed and proven.
I guess the major life-changing item on the board today is my decision to finally make the series of Ammy Inductions that I’ve been planning for a while, now.
As I have visioned it, the Ammy Inductions will be smartphone apps that you can apply to an Ammy you’re wearing for the day or for a special purpose. The inductions will be played through the ear-buds, I presume, so I’m asking Oz to record, mix and master the inductions specifically for those audio challenges. Ear Buds suck, but everybody’s got ’em.
I don’t like them for a zillion reasons, but if you want to have the least amount of earwax buildup and tone-deafness, I think I’d opt for the Monster iBeats, but there are other good choices out there as well. What you DON’T want is the $9.95 crap that doesn’t get the sound good enough to create the effect wanted.
Tonight, I’m writing the scripts for the Ammy Inductions, and I’ll be working for a couple of hours on trying to complete MAYA so you can experience the TRAINING EFFECT of my Transformative Meta-Tools for yourself.
I’m making plans to issue Ammy Inductions throughout the winter and spring. Next year will be working out a little differently than I’d planned — I won’t be doing the Tattoo-Fashions because the outlets that were offered didn’t come through, and there’s nobody here to take on the responsibility for the fashions area, so they’re once again being retired.
During the winter, I’ll be working to clear the workspace so we can paint and sculpt and possibly do jewelry classes. The whole of the winter will be dedicated to the Ammy Inductions, Crystal Loop Radios and my Meta-Tool Orbs. I will continue to develop the greeting card business, hoping it will become a cottage industry and will help us get more outside the box than we are today.
I had hoped to train someone to take over the antiquarian bookseller and another trainee to take over the rare art prints, but that isn’t happening, so I’m putting them all back into storage until someone shows interest, ability and willingness to put the time and energy into marketing those rare things.
You have to know what you’re doing to sell them. It’s not a game for idiots.
There are a few other changes around here; we talked yesterday about converting the granny house into a Brane-Power office space, and considering some of the changes here, it’s not a bad idea. Wouldn’t have worked a week ago, but with the developments over the past two days, now it seems to work.
If you haven’t seen the house since we started remodeling, you wouldn’t recognize it — but one thing sure — there are some big changes being made here, and next spring is going to be very different. Wait and see.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby