Hey Chicks & Dicks (
& other Non-Binary intelligences),
My name is Kase and up until now I've been a creepy lurker around these parts. I've got this ambitious project I've been working on, 'cause I'm an aspie nutter. It's rad to meet you all. I pretty much love all aspects of the franchises. Though I'm not a gamer of any sort for reasons of personal sanity (hyperfocus can be a real pretty bitch, y'all), I enjoy the cinematic quality of the art design and story building that goes along with them and thus I'm not overly bothered by any game mechanics, janky or otherwise, because I'm just going to catch the playthroughs on the 'tubes anyhow. That being said, I'm not all Sister Mary Sunshine and if you catch me on the right night I can gripe sesh with the best of 'em. (I'm looking at your sorry waste-of-time ass, 'Unreliable Narrator' trope,
you know what you did.) Also, because of the Emergence based nature of my project, I'm less interested in seemingly contradictory story elements than I am in deducing rational ways that those seeming contradictions could be rectified. What's
Emergence? Well, I'm glad you may or may not have asked...
Emergence as a concept is nature's real world knack for giving rise to patterns of exquisite order out of the humble origins of mindless chaos. It's the collectively defined layout of cities and their convergences and divergences of culture. It's the phenomena of light and color as we perceive it based upon nothing more than the patterns of molecules on the surfaces of different substances around us and how their rough little nanoscopic landscapes either absorb or reflect massless little eddies in spacetime. It's how ants form complex megastructure hives from nothing more than the end result of myriad individual little oblivious drones ambling haplessly about through their days, unaware that creatures magnitudes above their scale of lifespan or dimension sometimes stop to ponder them.
Mythologies and franchises alike rise out of weird human fascinations and collective creations, whether they be Olympian gods or bat men, or biomechanical nightmares. Rhapsodic claptrap aside, I'm fascinated by maps of the unknown and the vast hive of collective creation that can arise when our imaginations reach out and plumb the darkness just past the edges of our respective perception.
So, to that end, I started with a map, the idea of one anyway, a Star Trek map, A 3D Star trek map, as accurate and beautiful as possible, attempting to go one small step further than the monumental efforts of Geoff Mandel and other passionate nerds from otherwheres and otherwhens. From the collective data he and his cohorts mapped out in Star Charts back in 2002, drawing upon the then 35 years of Trek stories and a slightly more accurate star map then they had the last time they tried back in '79.
Yeah... not pretty yet, but these are snaps of an old work in progress.But, lets face it, with a dataset of over 700 individual stories nowadays, well it's gonna take a little longer than I've got on hand at the moment, so I've decided to back up a little and turn once again towards another love of mine; the collective universe of Aliens and Predator.
The contributions to organizational data structures that have been made by the likes of
SM, Aaron Percival and Crew, the
Xenopedia hive,
'Mother' Clara down in the antipodes, the cats behind
Alien Theory, and so many more, can't be applauded enough. My hope is that the work I'm putting into this practice in fresh kinds of madness will be greeted with the love that's wholly intended. And hey, I've only got a little over 200 points in the dataset, not counting adaptation iterations! Soooo, easy peasy, facey squeezie.
I'm not sure what precise form the final map will take, but I'm taking great pains to incorporate all the hard work put in by others along similar lines, I'm throwing everything down on the canvas and seeing what grand picture arises, will it resemble Middle Earth? Westeros? The Nine Circles of Dante's Infernal Hell? The Other Dimensional realms of ancient Elder Gods way above either your or my pay grade? Shit, I've got a nice pretty nice wealth of data from ESA Gaia to start with, so let's hit it.
The goal of my project is not to compartmentalize individual canons, but to add it all together and see what patterns of rationale or consensus arise. A bit of carbon here, a bit of silicon there, a smattering of science, some deduction, a teensy bit of sadism, some corporate intrigue and a plethora of viscera.
Well hey, that sounds like a franchise a mother could love.
Everyone here who is invested in these worlds are in one way or another a grand part of the project as well. Can't have a Church of The Queen Mother without some parishioners, as they say. And once again, I can't thank everyone who contributes here and elsewhere enough. The love displayed for these worlds is chaos sometimes, but in the end, it's a beautiful chaos.
