Sometimes the Cause of the Problem isn't the Solution

We live in a traumatizing world. Often, those traumas are supernatural. Mind magic can mess you up. The quest for enlightenment can scramble your brains. Too much paradox and you're a basketcase. Staring into the Abyss brings madness.

Many mages try to address these things with mind magic. But Sean, member of the Celestial Chorus and Euthanatos, argues that mundane psychological treatment is often the best solution to trauma, even when that trauma is brought on by mystical means.

The Politics of Endless Winter

Have you noticed that the world sucks a little more lately? That life is more dreary. More distracted. That you have less time to imagine and dream than you once did? That's because Winter is here. The long prophesied time of loss and death Changelings are so concerned with.

But it turns out, the Endless Winter is not a simple changing of the seasons. It is a political reality. A military accomplishment. Join us to hear Saladin to discuss the politics of the Fomorians, the ancient enemies of the children of the Tuatha. He accounts for the agendas of the White, Red, and Green Courts and their activities in the St. Louis region.

The Birth of Creation

Ever wondered how the world began? Well, join us at the Lore Summit to hear Mikael give a first hand account on the birth of Creation, the War of Wrath, and how the world was formed. He will also touch on humanity's true purpose, Lucifer's dream for humanity, and how it was ruined.

Maybe he's an angel. Maybe he's a demon. But man oh man, he's got some stories to tell.

Join us on May 11 and 12 for the third St. Louis Lore Summit. Register here.

Is your soul for sale or did the Devil make you do it?

It turns out, there are different ways to forge alliances with demons. Be it pacts, worship, or the sale of one's soul, the choices infernalists face have consequences on their moral and ethical lives. This year the Lore Summit is hosting a controversial speaker, Byzantium, a person who has reputedly engaged in past infernalist behavior.

While we do not condone the worship of or dealing with demons, we are committed to the thoughtful exchange of ideas. In that light, we look forward to a compelling academic treatment of the choices infernalists must make.

Join us on May 11 and 12 for the third St. Louis Lore Summit. Register here.

Toward a Common Accord

Master Skye of the Virtual Adepts takes on the pressing topic of how best to create alliances between supernatural factions. She draws on significant experience negotiating between mage and garou communities and discusses the challenges faced when trying to forge such accords.

Join us on May 11 and 12 for the third St. Louis Lore Summit. Register here.

Forty Quintessence to the Winner!

The Virtual Alexandria Project is happy to announce the prize for the top presentation. Forty (40) quintessence will be granted to the speakers(s) who give the top presentation.

Resister to be a presenter here.

Anywhere. Anywhen. Anyway

Alex Andria, curator and co-founder of the Virtual Alexandria Project, discusses the challenge of building nonspatial, nontemporal realities. He describes the design, creation, and deployment of the
Möbius Server, a computing server that exists out of space and time and can be accessed digitally, mentally, spiritually, and subconsciously.

Alex explores what implications this has on library curation, occult communities, data collection, geographic information systems, consciousness, and alternate realities.

Join us on May 11 and 12 for the third St. Louis Lore Summit. Register here.

Into the Dark

Rahul, elder of... well... we don't post such things on the internet. Suffice it to say, he's important. Anyway, Rahul gives a presentation on the Abyss. He breaks down the realm, what it is, how it works, and why you probably shouldn't just go there on vacation. He also delves into the denizens of the Abyss and the things you are likely to find there.

Join us on May 11 and 12 for the third St. Louis Lore Summit. Register here.

Many Threads, One Tapestry

Master Phaedra bani Bonisagus of the Order of Hermes, Deacon of Alexandria University offers the third installment in her series on the common threads running across supernatural magic. In this representative, interactive presentation she will lead an effort to blend the magics among various supernaturals.

Phaedra's body of scholarly work concerning magical energy makes the compelling case that all supernatural energies have common traits rooted in resonance, consensus, and historical inertia. Join her as she demonstrates the applicability of this theory for collaborators seeking to work across supernatural communities.

Join us on May 11 and 12 for the third St. Louis Lore Summit. Register here.

Marketing and Business in the Occult World

Alastor Rowe is well-known in some circles as a broker of occult paraphernalia. He joins the conference remotely, speaking on some of his experiences on dealing in the occult, common hazards, and the rewarding nature of his work. 

Infernalists not welcome.

Join us on May 11 and 12 for the third St. Louis Lore Summit. Register here.

Technocracy: Not our BFF

By Kyle Lauren

Howdy! Now imma legit professor so strap into some high learning (potentially with jetpack/goats). Technocracy aka "Evil mom in sunglasses" are gonna shoot all yall up or give you the bob barker, so ill give you some info on em. (Do whatcha will with it, they aint gods! Theres only one god and he doesnt dress like that. #america ).

Big ol' Q to the A for those who want a peek under their nickers. (One positive, ken doll smooth! So nice!) Free hugs and donuts for anyone who wants to talk about the bad touch they've done to you. Have a scientastic day!

Join us on May 11 and 12 for the third St. Louis Lore Summit. Register here.

The Truth is Out There... or is it Here Already?

Krychek

Nationally renowned Ufologist Krychek discusses the history of unidentified flying objects and their interactions with Earth. 

Join us on May 11 and 12 for the third St. Louis Lore Summit. Register here.

Odin: The Cthonic Aesir

Aspen Sorenson

Many modern representations of Odin cast him as a kindly god. But was he?

Aspen Sorenson brings attention to the darker and bloodier aspects of historic Odin worship.

Join us on May 11 and 12 for the third St. Louis Lore Summit. Register here.

The Möbius Server

The Möbius Server is a nonspatial, nontemporal computer server. It can be accessed anywhere, anytime, using computer technology or other forms of consciousness expanding activity (like dreaming, meditation, spirit messengers, etc). It has a variety of functionalities and securities that draw on a mastery of Time, Correspondence, Spirit, Mind, Entropy, and Prime. It is designed as a fee-per-service system, charging users quintessence, willpower, or a magical energy source of another kind (like gnosis, glamour, or pathos).

Types of Connection 
Digital: Use the Computer skill to connect a digital device to the server
Mental: Use the Meditation skill to mentally connect to the server
Spiritual: Use the Cosmology or Rituals skill to spiritually connect to the server
Dreaming: Use Lucid Dreaming skill to go there in sleep
Interdimensional: Characters with Time, Correspondence, and Spirit 5 can travel to their domain within the server.

Power Sources 
Any form of mental or spiritual energy can be used to pay the costs of the server. Quintessence, Gnosis, Glamour, Willpower, Pathos, etc.

Functions

Create an Account
The user connects to the server for the first time. They choose their type of access (digital, meditative, etc). They establish a personal domain within the server. They also choose which other accounts or services they would like their domain connected to (another users, the Virtual Alexandria Project, the MUSE Network, an interlibrary loan partner, etc). Their personal domain in the server only has the information that they supply (either through mental sharing or upload) or by connecting to other domains or networks. Interested in creating an account? Click here!

Basic Uplink
Connect to the server for a moment, allowing a computational/mental task to be done instantaneously. Can upload information (making it always available upon future uplinks, even if the information is forgotten by the user) or download information they have access to (things they have previously uploaded or information from networks their domain is connected to). (Rules: costs 1 quint, will, pathos, etc, per round. Being linked into the server gives the user an additional non-magical mental action that round and +5 to mental challenges that round.)

Deep Uplink
Connect to the server for a moment in embodied time around the user, but it allows the user to delve deeply into the server, temporarily suspending the users mental world and allowing them to work out complex problems in a moment. (Rules: cost: 3/connection. +5 to mental challenges, gain an additional downtime action based focused on learning, analysis, planning, or building mental models. At ST discretion, deep uplinks may spark the awakening of an unenlightened user or a seeking for an enlightened one.)

Reconfigure
By exposing themselves to vast knowledge, users can inspire themselves to transform, learn, and grow. (Rules: cost: variable. This can be used to alter one’s nature, trade one derangement for another, buy off mental flaws, buy mental merits, rename or rebalance resonance, or acquire merits related to the pursuit or protection of knowledge (like Higher Purpose, Conditional Magic, etc). The cost of this function is equal to the point value of the merit, flaw, resonance renamed, etc. STs can set cost for natures, derangements, etc. Also, STs can require the character to visit one of the Epiphamies in order to change a significant aspect of their character.)

Pantemporal Computing
Connect to data structures across time. When reading data, this effectively grants the user a use of pre/postcognition. Can be used to auguemnt the pursuit of various forms of knowledge. (Rules: cost: 2. Allows the user to gain +1 to the use of a background that spreads or acquires knowledge. Also, knowledge seeking/spreading backgrounds can be triggered in a single turn, as the server can backdate the request so that it finishes at the time of the request.)

Visit Epiphamy
The Server is connected to the Epiphamies, a set of abstract spirit worlds that teach important lessons and concepts. The Server enables users to create an astral representation of themselves and visit the Epiphamies or other astral realms. (Rules: cost: 5. Astrally projects the user to the Epiphamy realms)

Overclock
Creative users can potentially use the server to accomplish other effects given its unique design. (Rules: cost: variable. The cost and likelihood of success are subject to ST discretion. As a base cost, add the total of all relevant spheres needed for the effect.)

Proliferation

Open Source API: The code needed to connect a computer to the server is out in the world, hosted in various places across the web. It is all but impossible to get rid of the code, and it is a relatively simple matter to get one’s hands on it.

Temple of the Mind Meme: Spiritual and mental users often share with others the success they have had accessing the server. The methods of using it spread through religious, spiritual, and intellectual communities.

Networks within the Server

The Virtual Alexandria Project

Characters can access the project from their server.

The Epiphamies (from the Infinite Tapestry)

Epiphamies are powerful, highly conceptual domains found in the High Umbra. The Server is manifested in the same astral strata. In essence, it is an epiphamy in its own right. However, it is connected to the other epiphamies. Users venturing to the Epiphamies should do so at their own risk; they are complex spiritual realms

· The World Stage
· The Continuum Orrey
· Newtonian Mechanics/Einsteinian Relativity
· Motherhood
· The Apex of History
· The Nihil
· The Well of Remembrance
· The Well of Souls
· The Fortress of Government

In essence, the Server is itself an Epiphamy, inviting its visitors to reflect on the nature of space, time, and knowledge.

The Null Server

This project, which may well be our magnum opus, began as a joke.

Early in its inception, one of the taglines for the Virtual Alexandria Project was “Building the greatest library ever.” When chatting with a new member, I joked that the goal was to create a library so great, that it was better than even itself in every other moment in time.

That, of course, is silly.

Or is it?

We have to confess that despite the jocular nature of the comment, the notion has stuck with us since. We return to the idea from time to time as something like a paradoxical puzzle, usually with joking solutions. What if we created a temporal shift protocal that whenever anyone showed up in the library, one book was stolen from the immediate past and future and placed in the present, guaranteeing that the library the person encountered was marginally better. Of course, that only works after the library has stopped growing. And it’s also useless and absurd.  We’ve also joked about erasing the library from the past and future, so that it only exists as itself as a person encounters it. But erasing things from timelines is a painful and danger laden path. And it really actually accomplishes nothing, other than living up to the joke.

In this spirit of absurdity, we were hotly debating the subject of the library that was better than any other version of itself, when the Codex Librarian chuckles and says, “The way to make the greatest library ever is just to actually build it in ever.”

Funny thing. No one else laughed. Because that, as it would turn out, was the answer to the question we never had the courage to ask.

What is “ever?” In a temporal sense, “ever” is a nontime. “Ever” simultaneously means “at all times” (an ever present pain) while also meaning “at any time” (don’t ever do that). “Ever after” is an ambiguous un-pinnable moment, whilst “forever” means until time itself ends. This ambiguity of the meaning of “ever” is not because the word means many things. It’s because the word describes an actual component of temporal reality, namely, that there is an aspect of time that eludes all linearity and circularity. It simply is. Masters know this. That’s how they slip in and out of the timeline.

So, what if we built a repository of the library that exists in ever. This repository would exist out of time, but also, in any and every time. But if we are gonna go big, we might as well do it right. What else would need to be true of this repository?  

It would also need to exist out of space, so that regardless of where the library is in history it can be accessed. It should be accessible by digital, mental, and spiritual mediums, to be at least possibly accessible to anyone, regardless of the techno-spiritual moment of their era. Like all great libraries, is should also inspire learning and knowledge.

And suddenly, we had imagined a wonderwork. Our magnum opus.

And so we began to design.

How DO you build a library that exists out of time? Probably not hard for a chorister, just log your thoughts with your favorite god. But as a programmer… that’s a little trickier.

See, programming without space is not so hard. That’s really an easy thing for a VA. Computing isn’t about space, it’s about data. You just process the data to render the special arrays.

But how do you process data without time? That’s trickier. Yes, an equation exists outside of time. Consider how in the expression “Y=X+b,” “Y” is contemporaneous to “X+b.” Math is atemporal right out of the box. Even numbers have a sort of Platonic atemporality to them. But actual computing requires the execution of logic gates through time. Computers work through time. So how build a computer that can functions apart from time?

We tried quantum computing. We thought that the logic of quantum states could be leveraged to do the work. But it posed a spatial problem. The amplituhedrons we used to manage the quantum states only made sense in spatial configurations. And since we wanted a nonspatial foundation, that doesn’t work.

We tried ternary computing, cuz you know, VA. But the power of trinary computing comes from the third logic of “maybe,” Which didn’t make sense over time. Most, if not all “maybes,” become “yes” or “no” eventually, so the logic was wrong in one time and right in others, causing truth values to fluctuate depending on when you accessed it. Which did not lead to viable system.

Inspired though by the near miss of ternarity, we decided to ask, “What is the next step beyond ternary logic?”

In binary logic, there are two notions, “yes” and “no.”

In ternary, there are three notions, “yes,” “no,” and “maybe.”

But there is an old computing system that was designed in the 1960s when the computer world was still a wilderness called infinite valued logic. Originally, infinite valued was designed to assess degrees of truth (like “how green is it?” “60% green, actually”). But there has been a small but passionate group of cypherpunks who have kept the candle burning for infinite valued logic and have done some impressive though not always clearly applicable work on programming languages based in indeterminate logic.

Indeterminate logic is sorta like the maybe, but instead of treating maybe like a third position, it treats the area between 0 and 1 as an infinite array uncertain possibility. Indeterminate logic allows for programming based on uninitiated, undefined, empty, and even meaningless values. We call it “Null Computing.”

How does this help us code out of time and space? Well, it turns out people have been using the idea of null to solve troubling problems for a lot longer than computers.

What is null? It’s hard to think about, since our minds tend to focus on things. Null doesn’t exist, really. But null is different than nothing, too. Take for instance, the notion of Śūnyatā. It gets translated into English as “emptiness” or “voidness.” But at its heart, Śūnyatā is recognizing the way things are empty of intrinsic existence and underlying nature. It’s different than nothingness, as in the lack of things. Rather, it’s recognizing that even if there are things, there are probably empty of thingness. Sure, you might have an apple, but do “you” really “have” it? Is there something actually essentially you about the thing that is holding the apple? Probably not. And does holding it actually confer any status of “being had” to the apple? Nope. Or does the apple-in-hand change you into something that is “apple having?” Also no. To embrace the infinite indeterminacy of an empty universe requires letting go of ideas like “underlying,” “foundational,” “essential,” and “nature.”

Now, some people think this is depressing and nihilistic. And sure. If you rely on the belief in an underlying essence to all things to give you meaning and purpose, waking up to the fact is depressing. But there are plenty of people who derive strength, calm, hope, and faith from the emptiness of things. Frankly, that’s the foundation of meditation. Suñña, or “being empty,” is the goal of quite a few meditative paths.

The way meditation works is that the meditator opens themselves to emptiness. And in that moment, there is no self. When you open your mind to emptiness, you discover there is no mind. Or rather, that the mind and self aren’t as stuffed full as they seem. There is an infinite array of possible selves and possible minds that can be expressed. The place of emptiness isn’t the same as nothingness. The null isn’t the abyss. The null isn’t calling out trying to consume the world. The null isn’t the black hole all things fall into when they are lost. The null isn’t a place at all, for starters. It’s the empty, timeless, spaceless condition of all things. And in that way, it’s generative. Like an inexhaustible bellows. A bottomless well. That’s why people have been meditating with the null as a guide for millennia.

And that’s where we’ll build the server.

Ok, sure, but how the F do you program using an indeterminate logic? Don’t your programs actually need to execute? Turns out, you need a mastery of indeterminacy. Or to use mage speak, you need entropy to make it work. You can create a computer logic that is driven neither by 0s or 1s, but the indeterminate space between. But what you need is a way to diffuse questions articulated in 1s and 0s into the indeterminate array, and then a way to collapse the indeterminate array back into 1s and 0s. In essence, you use entropy to translate probabilistically between certainty and uncertainty.

“Ok, fancy man,” most people say at this point, “that sounds like passingly interesting philosophy, but how do you actually design a computer to actually program that way?” Turns out, every digital device on the planet has the capacity to program in null logic.

Wait, what?

Don’t you need a fancy computer? Like a cutting edge ternary device? Aren’t computer bits either in the 1 position or the 0 position? There is no third position, right? But, actually, there is. Think on it a moment.

The null position is when the computer is off. The value of a bit is determined by wheather or not a the electricity of a capacitor is higher or lower than a designated level. But what about when you power off the device? What’s its value then? Welp, it’s undetermined.

This reality of computing devices brings the capacity of null computing to its fullest potential. A user can ask a question of an operating system that will be diffused into an indeterminate array when the computer powers down. The moment the computer is off, the indeterminate array is automatically (because it’s atemporal) computed using the null server. When the device is powered back on, start up protocol run a program that collapses the indeterminate array back into a determined one that can be stored in the 1s and 0s. The null server is built in null space, so every computer anywhere is always and already synched with it when the computer is off. So, you write a command, it is translated on the powerdown, executes the moment it’s off, and the output is displayed on the startup. It’s sorta like teaching computers to meditate.

Why is this useful? Well, it allows any computer to synch with the null server. This means allows non-internet connected devices to still access a repository of knowledge. It also means that literally any computing question could be answered in the time it takes to reboot. If you had a data set with an obnoxious amount of computing, you could power it down and do the calculations in the null server, because every calculation happens simultaneously. It also means that programmers could potentially draw on datasets from past and future events, because the atemporal nature of the null server means that uploads and downloads are all happening to it at the same time. Oh, and it would have storage space that is infinite.

How do you actually build something in null spacetime? That’s worth a whole other article, but there’s plenty of precedent. Spirits can warp entities out of reality (they do it to crazy ass mages). Some magics can send people to interdimensional oubliettes. Heck, there’s this whole level of reality beyond the Dreamshell that is basically experimental time and space. Suffice it to say, we conceptualize the actual platform of the null server as drawing on our past work with reality mapping, the Dreamtime, and the Correspondence Point. The time part is the hardest bit. It requires building a server that is both apart from time and across time. We’ve read about mages who can achieve true pantemporality. We had to hack that one a bit. We rely on sidestepping time and then building a multitemporal API. The server exists aside time, but pushes queries and notifications across time.

So, what are the actual steps?

1. Design the programming language of indeterminate logic.
2. Design and build the actual server in null timespace.
3. Create a user interface that is permissive of various information technologies (cuz there’s good evidence that it could be accessed by people meditating in addition to computers)
4. Create a network security plan.
5. Run the thing and work through bugs.

It’s a nutty idea. No doubt. But it to say that it’s the future of computing is to miss out the fact that it might already exist and we just haven’t figured out how to access it.