Before getting into some links regarding the burgeoning metaverse business, let me mention that the pictures in this entry are mainly from a day recently spent on the bluffs at Davenport with our daughter Isabel — check out her online jewelry site isabeljewelry.com! Hammered wedding rings a specialty.

I took a day off from working on my Hylozoic revisions and went to a conference called Metaverse U organized by Henrik Bennetsen of the Stanford Humanities Lab. As I explain in my nonfiction tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, and dramatize in my novel, Postsingular, my sense is that virtual reality can never replace actual reality—but maybe I’m missing the point. It’s stimulating to see what’s up in this rapidly morphing nexus of ideas. The latest wrinkle is to think of the metaverse as business.

As I mentioned in my notes on the NASA Virtual World conference, the people who talk about “metaverse” are particularly thinking about Stephenson’s Snow Crash. The word’s taken on a life of it’s own, usually referring to some kind of shared mixed reality. I had my laptop open during the talks and here in classic weblog style, are some of the links that went by.

Metaverse Roadmap Overview
What happens when we mash together video games, virtual worlds, geospatial maps, simulations, virtual business, and online avatars acting as your agents? The Metaverse! One of the biz talks was about how something’s added if a team works together in the form of online avatars instead of just via email. It’s science-fictional, imagining having to actually “go” to an office building and roam the halls so as to potentiate chance interactions with your fellow workers. The “water cooler” effect. Another guy remarked that just having a visible grid of webcam photos of everyone who’s at their machine might be enough.

Technology Review: Second Earth
Tech article about how the World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an environment combining elements of Second Life and Google Earth. I myself have had problems getting interested in Second Life — this stems from the “bus station” effect, which refers to the fact that new arrivals to this locale find themself in a somewhat dull and crummy part of “town” among unfriendly predators and mockers. Also, when you arrive, you’re “dressed” as a noob. Also I really dislike the way the world looks—all those blank polygons, it’s the same in videogames. But I guess if I was socializing there I might like it. And if it’s blended with the physical world, it could really take off. We’re almost talking about telepathy here…

SceneCaster – Design 3D scenes!
A tool for making 3D rooms to attach to something like your Face Book page.

Welcome to VastPark
Another tool for creating metaverse content such as a virtual World, online game or 3D visualization. I guess you could build a virtual office for your drones as well.

Stanford Virtual Worlds Group
The Virtual Worlds Group, Stanford University, Computer Science Department. They built an artificial life app called Dryad, which is about farming virtual trees. The novel idea is to use user selections as the fitness function for searching a 19 dimensional space of all possible trees. This is perhaps a foreshadowing version of Will Wright’s Apocalyptic SPORE game due Sept 7, 2008, when life as we know it will change 4ever.

3D Models, Plugins, Textures, and more at Turbo Squid
3d Models, Plugins, software, Textures, at Turbo Squid for purchase and free. A Borgesian universal library with one of EVERYTHING. The guys running this site (out of New Orleans of all places) told me that occasionally noobs will buy one of their meshes and then be looking for it to arrive in physical form in their snailmail—as opposed to downloading the mesh file using the key they purchased. One guy was hounding them for the glass bong he thought he’d bought. Some Nigerians, who’d been very pleased with buying seven hundred tennis balls for the price of one, were upset when they got no balls at all.

I’m getting to be like those old masters who’d paint a whole picture in grisaille before putting the colors on top. I finished Hylozoic with one more outline of the final chapter—finally it seemed clear and made sense; I could see the light through the brush and trees. Then I pasted the outline into my Novel document (as grisaille) and kept revising it until it’s the actual text.

I did the very last revisions on paper, lying out on a hilltop in Almaden Quicksilver Park near Guadalupe Reservoir. I’m tired of staying inside on these nice spring days, I feel nostalgic for the freedom I felt when I wasn’t working on this book. I gave Bosch a line to this effect in Chapter Eight: “It’s refreshing to put my life into upheaval. As a youth I dreamed of being a penniless wanderer. My small success has imprisoned me.”

So now it’s time for the second draft. I printed out the whole novel and am going through it from beginning to end.As I’ve mentioned before, I’m always shocked how very many things I find to correct. It feels good, like picking scabs off your skin or sanding a peeling wall. But for me there’s always an element of anxiety as well. Is it fixable? Are the changes ever going to converge?

I correct at various levels. Some of the things I deal with: avoiding overuse of the same word, making it clear who’s talking both by attirbution and by editing their style of speech, making harmonious phrasing by mentally reciting each sentence aloud and fixing rhythms and alliteration, putting in smooth segues so the reading flows without a hitch, supplying character’s motivation and showing it in their expressions and pauses, balancing underexplanation vs. overexplanation, livening up dialog so it’s fun to hear, toning down my overly idiosyncratic and ranting viewpoints, foreshadowing things to come for a unified effect while makings sure the more startling plot turns are still a surprise, ferreting out and reparing any logic flaws or science inconsistencies, checking the time sequencing and “stage blocking” of characters in space and time, putting in plenty of ambient descriptions of smells/sights/sounds, filtering out stereotypes and received ideas, trying for some really funny jokes, etc.

Sometimes I can hardly believe how much effort it is to write a book. On Hylozoic, I have, like, 180,000 words of notes for a 90,000 words book. It especially chapped my butt the other day to see a comment where some guy said my work is “sloppy.” I wish! It’s a lot of work to make something look so loose and rambling. And it’s stressful to work so high off the ground without a net.

In my “Maelstrom from Poe’s PYM” entry on February 7, 2008, I quoted part of the ending of Poe’s Narratiave of Arthur Gorden Pym. My notion was that Poe was describing how it would be to sail into a very large maelstrom.

I’ve been rethinking the meaning of the passage, keeping Poe’s fascination with Symmes’s notion of the Hollow Earth, under which there might be an ocean-covered hole at the South Pole, and that a ship might be able (pace Newton) to be able to sail over the lip and into the inner seas.

I think that’s what Poe is in fact describing here; that’s why the distant cataract of gray mist seems to get higher and higher in the sky and why the sky seems to get get darker. To understand about the rising cataract, look at the figure above. In position A, the opposite side of the hole is just a stripe on the horizon. But in position B, the opposite side of the hole sees to lie some thirty or forty degrees above the horizon.

Of course if there were a really big maelstrom down whose slope you were gradually proceeding, you would also see this effect.

Yesterday I worked this passage into Hylozoic, with today’s (still rather rough) draft quoted below. My hero Chu is flying along over a higher dimesional sea, carried in the mouth of a giant flying manta ray called Duxy, and accompanied by Heironymus Bosch.

Drained by the steady effort, Chu grew numb and dreamy. He didn’t quite notice when things changed, but at some point they’d entered upon a region of novelty and wonder. A high range of light gray vapor hung on the horizon, occasionally flaring up in lofty streaks. Here and there, the surface below them seemed to boil, as if stirred by vagrant eddies.

A huge bubble shot up from the sea below Duxy, accompanied by a wild flaring up in the vapor ahead. Duxy teeped that she wanted to turn away; she begged her passengers to stop pushing. Worn and frightened as they were, they ceased their efforts. Nevertheless they continued sweeping forward in Groovy’s wake, perhaps even more rapidly than before. A swirling wind was driving them along.

As always the interbrane air glowed with light, but a still-brighter illumination rose from the roiled sea’s surface. The glare cast an odd light upon the lean, weathered features of Bosch, who’d never stopped craning from Duxy’s mouth. Chu was lying beside the artist, also staring out.

The gray band had risen prodigiously above the visible horizon, and had taken on a more distinct form. It resembled a limitless cataract, rolling silently into the sea from some immense and far-distant rampart. The gigantic curtain ranged to the left and right as far as Chu could see. But rather than a roar, he heard a singing hiss.

Crosswise currents were ripping the surface of the sea below them. Through the foamy rents, Chu could glimpse a chaos of flitting vegetal beings: the subbies. As they in turn noticed him, he felt the tingle of their root hairs reaching out to his skull, feeding him altered images of how they looked. They took on the forms of men with the heads of birds, and of fish with human legs. Racing along half-submerged beneath the surface, the subbies were awaiting a chance to attack.

Chu had a sense that the ocean’s surface was slanting down, and that the summit of the distant cataract was bulging into heavens. And now he saw something horrific, less than a mile ahead. Beyond a raging band of foam, the ocean surface curved down sharply and plunged out of sight. They were scudding towards the anomaly with hideous velocity, the fierce gale fluttering Duxy’s wings like rags.

With a distinct mental effort, Chu grasped that he was looking across the mouth of a maelstrom some hundred miles wide. As they neared the seething lip and the vast void of the great pool’s core, the Hrull let out an anguished squeal of terror. She opened wide her mouth and spit out her passengers, forcing them forward with her powerful throat and cheeks.

And, huzzah, I pushed on and actually finished the first draft of the ending of Hylozic. As of February 8, 2008, my latest strand of spider silk reaches across the void! Yeah, baby!

I’m working on a big maelstrom scene in the last chapter of Hylozoic. To give it a spooky flavor, I plan to appropriate some material from Poe. He wrote about giant maelstroms in two places. First, there’s his story “The Descent into the Maelström,” and second there’s the ending of his novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, where they seem to be sailing into a giant hole in the ocean at the South Pole. Here’s some excerpts of that (I’m not going to use this much, in my novel, though, more like a few phrases).

[What one thinks of is in the nature of a huge drain in the ocean floor, like in Pirates of the Caribbean model shown here. To where is the water draining? Probably to the interior of the Hollow Earth.]

March 1st.- Many unusual phenomena now indicated that we were entering upon a region of novelty and wonder. A high range of light gray vapor appeared constantly in the southern horizon, flaring up occasionally in lofty streaks, now darting from east to west, now from west to east, and again presenting a level and uniform summit-in short, having all the wild variations of the Aurora Borealis. The average height of this vapor, as apparent from our station, was about twenty-five degrees. The temperature of the sea seemed to be increasing momentarily, and there was a very perceptible alteration in its color. …

[Rudy’s painting of the Hollow Earth. The maelstroms are at the north and south holes.]

March 3d.-The heat of the water was now truly remarkable, and in color was undergoing a rapid change, being no longer transparent, but of a milky consistency and hue. In our immediate vicinity it was usually smooth, never so rough as to endanger the canoe-but we were frequently surprised at perceiving, to our right and left, at different distances, sudden and extensive agitations of the surface; these, we at length noticed, were always preceded by wild flickerings in the region of vapor to the southward. …

[The legend of the maelstrom started in Scandinavia. This is Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina maelstrom (1539).]

March 5th.-The wind had entirely ceased, but it was evident that we were still hurrying on to the southward, under the influence of a powerful current. And now, -indeed, it would seem reasonable that we should experience some alarm at the turn events were taking-but we felt none. … I felt a numbness of body and mind—a dreaminess of sensation but this was all.

[An old drawing that’s floated around for years, an inspiration.]

March 6th.-The gray vapor had now arisen many more degrees above the horizon, and was gradually losing its grayness of tint. The heat of the water was extreme, even unpleasant to the touch, and its milky hue was more evident than ever. Today a violent agitation of the water occurred very close to the canoe. …

[This is a very powerful tidal current near Salstraumen, Norway, also there’s one in Japan. What we see is really a “von Karman vortex street,” rather than a single giant maelstrom. I’ve always wanted to live on Von Karman Vortex St.]

March 9th.-… The range of vapor to the southward had arisen prodigiously in the horizon, and began to assume more distinctness of form. I can liken it to nothing but a limitless cataract, rolling silently into the sea from some immense and far-distant rampart in the heaven. The gigantic curtain ranged along the whole extent of the southern horizon. It emitted no sound.

March 21st.-A sullen darkness now hovered above us—but from out the milky depths of the ocean a luminous glare arose, and stole up along the bulwarks of the boat. … The summit of the cataract was utterly lost in the dimness and the distance. Yet we were evidently approaching it with a hideous velocity. At intervals there were visible in it wide, yawning, but momentary rents, and from out these rents, within which was a chaos of flitting and indistinct images, there came rushing and mighty, but soundless winds, tearing up the enkindled ocean in their course.

[Aether vortex by Edwin Babbitt, 1878]

March 22d.-The darkness had materially increased, relieved only by the glare of the water thrown back from the white curtain before us. Many gigantic and pallidly white birds flew continuously now from beyond the veil, and their scream was the eternal Tekeli-li! as they retreated from our vision. … And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.

You get the sense that they’re sailing into something more than a big whirlpool, actually. It’s like the giant drain where the oceans tumble into the Hollow Earth, and there’s volcanism in play as well. This passage was a big inspiration for my own The Hollow Earth. Note that the date when Pym reaches the Southern Hole is Rudy’s birthday! Sinkchronicity…