Hmm...

[silveradept]

...things get interesting. Blue beats Wildcats, Badgers fall to Spartan assault. There may only need to be one. Championship hinges on Ohio, much like the election. If Buckeyes should fold, Blue goes BCS bowling. If challenges went well, will be there to witness personally. Saturday next, a very interesting time.

Coincidences are starting to appear on a more frequent basis. Whether this is a result of courting active chaos, actively courting chaos, or chaos courting activity, I'm not sure. Many of them are favorable, or at least amusing coincidences. Whatever it is, it's a lot of fun.

Toilet Humor.

Followed by Social Justice - God's Plan all along. And someone who thinks that Evangelicals should call themselves Satan-worshippers.

Finally, the Get-To-Know-Ya Meme, chaining through goji:

The problem with LJ: we all think we are so close, but really, we know nothing about each other. So I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away.

Comments

[rimspace.livejournal.com]

Okay, soulbonds. I think I grok from context the meaning you are using that word in (I know of about half a dozen different meanings, but your usage has narrowed it to two) but assumption is the mother of all cockups so - can you explain about them? Who, what, why, where? Feel free to refuse or send via email if you'd prefer not to explain in an open post.

it's hopefully good in its own way.
:) t'is, although I must admit I haven't gone all the way through the archives yet, got quite a lot to cover there! (BTW, did you know there's a couple of markup errors in your archive page template?)

[silveradept]

Bad markup fixed. Advertisements will probably now appear on Archive pages...

As for Soulbonds, it's a little strange to put the proper spin on the meaning that I want, so if things are confusing, ask and I'll try to clarify.

Soulbonds, as I use the term, at the most basic level, are characters, original or otherwise. These characters are interwoven extremely tightly into the mental space that they could be seen to be separate, but real, entities of someone's mental space.

It's not a multiple system, though. These are usually fictional characters that have found their way into our minds. It's like the next step beyond imaginary friends. Instead of merely coming and going at our call, the Soulbonds appear to stay and go at their own discretion. Their presence is often felt by the person that has them in some way or another. For example, I tend to converse with the original characters I've created, and can feel their responses as if they were separate entities. It's like different parts of my brain talking to each other, somewhat personified. Only somewhat because the characters are known to give a response that my brain would not come up with.

A Soulbond may be what happens when you see or create a character that has the things that you lack, or think you lack, so that with them you feel a bit more complete. At the same time that I know that they're all in my head, I don't mind their existence, and sometimes actively court them as separate beings in my mental landscape.

I suppose, in a nutshell, Soulbonds are what happens when characters stop being characters and start being people.

Make any sense at all?

[rimspace.livejournal.com]

Make any sense at all?

Perfectly so, and there's at least one school of cognitive science that provides an explanation for how that sort of thing arises - the process may be vital to the formation of consciousness in fact (and if you take those theories to their logical conclusion, you really have several other "real" minds inside your brain in addition to your own: they may be fragmentary and incomplete but they are real)

[silveradept]

So even science is willing to theorize their existence? How interesting...

It would certainly explain a few things about the process of writing and how characters, after a while, begin to slip the bounds of their writer and start behaving somewhat independently. So now we can say that our imaginary friends are real - they're just all in our head. Perfect humor for me.

[rimspace.livejournal.com]

Definitely, in fact if one theory about consciousness is correct (that it is an emergent product of "strange loops" - self-referential patterns that form in complex symbolic processing systems (whether lexical or neurological)) then the formation of such secondary minds is a simple byproduct of the creation of suitably complex mental "instances" of those minds. Effectively the pattern of symbols your mind produces to represent the character can, if it reaches a suitable level of complexity, begin to draw on the resources of your brain, sharing symbols with the rest of your mind, growing itself over time as it is used until it reaches the point where it becomes, effectively, another mind. Secondary to your own, but capable of independent thought.

[silveradept]

So that's the point where the writer stops writing the character and starts watching the character and takes notes. (The characters in my head cheer and snicker at the truth of the previous statement)

Still, if we're developing these multiple minds, doesn't that mean that almost everyone has a case of at least low-level multiple personality disorder, even though most keep their alternate selves on a leash?