Yes, very much so. And intentional.

Being There, which I had completely forgotten about brings up the fact that in very complicated times where people are seriously overthinking things, are too serious with themselves, it is often hard to tell the difference between the fool and the Zen Master/Guru. A lot of it is about being hyper "on message" the first does it because he/she has no other message and the other does it because he/she does, but does not want to distract listeners with all that the simple message implies. Get them to accept the base principle and then, eventually everything else will follow.

But it also comes back to mental/political jujitsu, saying just enough for your opponent to hang themselves. In the US, Obama used this strategy very easily on the Clintons and then McCain. Bernie is doing it again, but a bit more subtly. He doesn't need to say much to cause his opponent to overthink, overreact.

Of course, on the other side, there is the fool who says very simple things because he has nothing else to say. And urges people to blame "the other" for their problems.

And then of course, the Fog of War was a series of events that were interpreted by people with way to much baggage who saw the world through a very specific prism, jumping to conclusions using overreaching assumptions that become self-fulfilling prophecy.

But then, I think many wars are that; at least when you have an otherwise stable level of detente (ignoring the accent). Obviously many wars are simply cases of naked aggression and invasion to steal territory or resources. But in an otherwise stable system, it's usually over amplification. WWI was a series of overreactions, WWII was interesting in that it was a series of reactions spawned by the end of WWI, that led to acts of hatred/violence and naked aggression and a desire to seize territory and resources as retribution.

Since then, most have been the result of a series of incidents that spun out of control, people over thinking the chess board.

How about the Orc priest of Tiernon, and the Catholic racism in James Clavell's Tai-Pan?

To mentally escape an interminable meeting, I was picking at the Astlan universe's weaknesses yesterday.

The principal problem is that the technological and social development in the various interlinked worlds in the localverse are too close to each other, taking into consideration that other actors speak of personal experience spans counted in hundreds of thousands of years. It's just too convenient to be plausible.

However, if you look at things from a different angle, and consider the classification of worlds into hightech, medium tech and low tech, if the gods' mana and animus parasitism actually is the central theme, gods are able to suck enough mana out of a world that it does not regenerate quickly enough for them, and the gods tend to forcefully keep the still mana-rich worlds at a lower technological development level, the real adventure would be the liberation of sapients from these parasites.

The gods would naturally keep the worlds they are leeching off in their nets, interlinked, drop them when they become unviable, and thus they get their chance to become high tech.

Perhaps Mount Doom is really a device to lessen the mana income inequality across the worlds. Mana to the people!

Edited by user Thursday, March 17, 2016 10:00:09 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I completely skipped missed the social development part too.

Funny because it was about one or two weeks ago when I explained exactly why there are so many shared cultural references across planes, and that has less to do with mana sucking; but everything to do with the gods and which sets of gods are plying each other.

Or is Tizzy and agent of Law?

These questions and more coming in Book 3 as we see more of the multiverse and how things "work?"

The plot shall thicken, the book(s) [Remember DoA is a single book in multiple volumes] shall complicate even as more curtains are drawn back.

And very oddly enough, mentally coincidental, the post I just did with the spoiler, with which you replied here with a Latin lesson by the ArchDemon Cleese, was started (in the book) by a question Tom asked as to how someone in Mount Doom could know Latin, when Doom had been offline/offgrid for 4,000 years, the entirety of Roman history.

I think we have completed a circle with that, which is odd, because that is...I am starting to sound like Tizzy, this is dangerous. Agh, I think he's trying to possess me!

I think Tizzy's standard line about his internal conversations is that he is talking to us. People on earth. You and me, the people on this site.

It says that NBC has blocked the video content in my country on copyright grounds!

That is preposterous, we have no copyright laws in the Abyss. You steal my original work, I eat you, nibble by nibble!

Sort of like a gelatinous cube...

Maybe that would work?

Is this what Tizzy has in his head? (Got mail from China today!)

This is pretty close to what being an Astlan Demon might feel like, after a few thousand years.

Edited by user Wednesday, March 30, 2016 12:33:10 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

In the movie, it looked like he'd gotten bored with humanity after a millenium or ten of bouncing around.

I suppose demons could view wizards as generous benefactors, since their torture, odd jobs, and the general anticipation of a feast keeps things somewhat fresh.