Intergalactic Summit

It wouldn't surprise me. Sometimes it just takes a big enough shock to the system... and then you can't stop seeing it. The first battle of B-D, during the Fountain War, was a bad day for me. In the moment, it was... intense, it was busy - too much to do for there to be anything to think about. We kept throwing battleships into the grinder, trying to take the gate... if we saved one, it was a huge victory. If it was lost three hours later... it was a hard slap that fueled our anger.

But afterwards? In the quiet hours, once Akasha'd debriefed the logi and you were all alone staring out an exterior window toward the debris field... there was time to think. That may have been where it started, for me. It's certainly the first time I can remember dwelling on the losses.

What an unfortunate circumstance that the Republic and State are enemies. For all of our differences, the Caldari and Minmatar have a dazzling congruence in our customs and beliefs.

The Vherokior people take matters of meditation very seriously, for one cannot go through life without a center; a place to plant one's roots. Our practices vary, but clan Gangari practices a form of moving meditation and martial art we call gongfu-qi. The idea is to enter a state of Chan, which, I believe, correlates to your concept of Zen, by executing movements that require supreme flexibility, dexterity, strength and focus. Great time and dedication is needed to master this discipline. The greatest practitioners of our history are said to be able to walk in the desert without displacing a single grain of sand - and shatter solid rock with their strikes.

It's purpose is the unification of opposites - stillness and action, grace and strength, compassion and harshness - a principle that my people employ in every facet of their lives. The tenants of gongfu-qi can apply outside of martial arts. Gongfu after all means "supreme skill obtained through dedication." A successful merchant, and artful statesman - these can be said to have gongfu. But what of the qi?

Literally, qi means breath. But in this context, it represents the movement of the universe - the very soul of all that is, was and ever will be. We are all parts of existence, and it is qi what connects us and drives us. The Sebiestor call it rlung, the Jin-Mei call it dao and the Achura know it as prana. Together, gongfu-qi represents the never-ending pursuit of mental, physical and spiritual perfection.

Thank you for opening this thread - it was a thrill to share this piece of my culture with the IGS.

Respectfully, pilot, do you feel that those practices are still useful to capsuleers? I do have training of this sort in the Archur tradition, but haven't kept it up. It feels like a distraction from my training as a pilot and capsuleer.

Is there a purpose I have overlooked?

The short answer is that one day you will be forced to act without the capsule and the abilities that it confers. Therefore, to rely on such technology is not a strength, but a weakness. Grounding oneself in martial conditioning of the body and the mind will save you when technology eventually breaks, malfunctions or is usurped. Also consider that maintaining human talents reminds you of human limits, which offers a perspective that infomorphs, such as ourselves, typically lose over time.

Ah-- well, it clarifies the difference between our points of view, at least. I'll try to explain my own.

Achura train more for the sake of perfecting our souls (the specifics vary from sect to sect) than to prepare ourselves for real combat. It's a spiritual exercise; the warrior monks of old mostly disappeared along with our bows, swords, and penchant for plucking out the eyelashes of defeated enemies.

I've seen modern hand to hand combat, close up, the result of accepting an invitation into someone else's world. Things went badly wrong, and I don't think all the martial arts expertise on Achura would have saved me if I'd been forced to depend on it. Luckily there was someone on hand who knew what he was doing-- with a scrambler rifle and a dropsuit that could tear through deck plate.

I'm okay with leaving the hand-to-hand combat to the experts.

My old self (I'm an amnesiac, to be clear-- a damaged copy) was a pirate for many years, and certainly kept up her training. I'm a small, quick person, and specialized in daggers, but the only people I apparently ever fought and killed with those skills were my own relatives. That is in fact about as bad as it sounds.

Worse, probably. I murdered my grandfather that way. So, maybe that's another reason. In the meantime, the weapon I choose to train with until it becomes an extension of myself ... is my ship. There's so much to do and see-- do I really need to spend my time learning another way to kill people?

My current self is very much, and quite literally, a child of technology. I'm a partially-failed clone of my original self. I can't remember a time when I wasn't a capsuleer. Technology created me, sustains me; if being without my tools kills me in the end, I guess I'm okay with dying. There'd be a symmetry to that.

If that's a weakness ... I guess I'm okay with having weaknesses.

Until then, in case I wander down the wrong alley and fail to wander out again, I maintain a set of backup clones.

This bit's essentially identical. Different sects approach the details differently, but ... yeah.

Pretty much the same.



That does sound about right.

I do think it's healthy to stay aware of our human frailties and so on (and I really, really don't think we're gods), but ...

... I'm 1.48 m tall and weigh a little under 37 kg.

I think I'd rather spend my time out of pod exploring than learning that I'm small and fragile; that bit's kind of obvious.

Your first line gave me kind of a chill, Mr. Farsaidh, but actually I think we're on about the same page.

The first part is what my antecedent called an "infomorph." It's a word I still use.

The second, especially the insistence that you're still human, is very different from what she thought she was, but I do agree, even if I don't have any experiences from my time as a baseliner that I can remember.

"Human" isn't exactly a concept engraved in the fabric of reality. It's an idea in our heads. We've entered a strange bit of history, where the margins of what is "human" are being tested. What it means is kind of up to us, but it seems better to make it a wider circle than a narrower one.

Otherwise, we're going to get people, like the old me, saying, "Well, if I'm not human, I don't have to play by human rules, do I?"

A bowl of popcorn, my cat Fluffels *holds up an unamused tabby*, and the IGS.

At my temple, we have always listened to the waves crashing against the Kemijoki. The cliffs there are ancient, resilient stone, and for as long as we have records, we've let ourselves fill with the sound of the water battering in futility against the rock.

After our, uh, forced emigration, we were forced to adapt, of course. We tune a rf frequency antenna to the ripples of the solar wind in Kakakela, now, and its interactions with the gas giant our station orbits. It works, but I don't think it's quite the same. We miss those old sounds. Some clever monk managed to smuggle a chunk of stone from the cliffs during the evacuation, though; it has a place of honour in the temple.

You're right though. There's no right way to do it.



That's really interesting! We don't do that at all. We focus mostly on walking-while-empty. Which I guess isn't much of a focus at all.