Unbound Hearts

As an anthropologist, my objective is to observe and record in hopes of educating myself and (ideally) informing others. I am inclined to remain in a position of neutrality, a position where those on all sides of an issue can feel comfortable speaking with me. The Unbound Hearts, with its focus on neutrality, especially protecting that of others and providing a free space for the open exchange of ideas, provides a safe and open location to call my home.

I will have my own opinions. Some of them will be expressed. But I do not wish the expression of my own opinions to prevent others from expressing their own to me. My personal feelings as an explorer of D’ni may occasionally conflict with my professional instincts to support no side and to merely observe. I acknowledge this in advance.

Yet I wish it to be clear that no matter what position you take, whether or not it opposes my own personal one, if you wish to speak with me, you may. If you wish to share your story, your experience, your position, then I am interested in hearing it.

My goal, if one could call it that, is to gain an understanding of the new D’ni, of the restorers and explorers who inhabit the Cavern, whether they be new or old, regardless of their intentions, and to share this understanding with any who ask. I hope to hear from explorers about their experiences, to gather stories of past events, or essays on a person’s position on a current Cavern event or discussion, and more. Fundamentally, I am a story-gatherer, a listener to tales of others; to a lesser extent, I am a story-teller, the kind that shares the stories I have been given with others. This is my calling.

But to do this I need stories and contacts. My hope is that my membership in the Unbound Hearts provides me with this opportunity, that by being in an neutral and open public location I can make myself accessible who want their stories told and shared. I am here to hear you and your story, regardless of who you are and what you support. I am unaligned. I am open. I am an Unbound Heart.

-Renata Jael

Kaelri’s obsession with the restoration of the lake is mildly contagious. Or maybe the imager in our Bevin showing his constant progress is just guilt inducing enough. Either way, I’ve been spending an awful lot of time in Er’cana. Problem is, when word reaches the most unstable of the Unbound Hearts that it’s possible to use the ovens to make things that go boom? The results are good or bad, depending on where you stand.

I was thinking, I don’t know… fireworks? Pretty sparks? Anything with fire floats my boat (and usually doesn’t sink it!) Maybe we could have a nice display in Bevin to celebrate the return to the cavern.

Kaelri caught up to me in Ae’gura of course. He’s usually so painfully polite, and still was… you could only tell he was angry based on the deadpan factor when he called my name across the courtyard.

First words as I walked up weren’t a surprise at all. “You blew up a silo.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be back to feeding, and loving, and calling algae George soon enough.”

“You blew up a silo, dear.”

“There’s how many more of them around the outer edge of the lake? A bunch are wrecked. One more won’t make much difference, and I know to avoid THAT recipe now…” I’d already found another book to place in the Er’cana factory I’d taken up care of, and told him as much.

“You blew. Up. A silo.”

“It was a small explosion! No one even felt it. It’s just a crack really, and a few fallen stones. You make it sound like I blew the far wall half way to K’veer!”

It appears repair work is going to be my penance. Upon failing to find any heavy equipment the DRC may have abandoned, I’ve taken to using one of the “heavy” Maintainer’s suits. Going is slow, not least of all because I’ve next to no bloody clue how to use the thing. It’s more or less a rolling tank and survey machine, and if it had a mouth I’m sure it’d be telling me how perturbed it is to be put to this use instead of examining new ages. If anyone knows where the Guild of Miners stored equipment, I’d appreciate you dropping me a line. In particular, I’ve had my heart set on one of those devices that concentrates stone into liquid Nara. Not only could I use it to clear the rubble, I could then reinforce any of my repairs (which are sure to be amateur) with the Nara. Maybe stone that strong could even withstand a few more booms…

~ Clyde Craft

Let me be clear: when someone you thought was dead turns out not to be, it’s wonderful news. I had mostly left the cavern after Sydney Austin’s apparently-fatal accident in May of 2007, but before her reappearance the following July. As a result, I have spent the last three years believing that Sydney was dead.

You can imagine my disquiet, then, when I first heard of the Ranting Thespian.

I knew immediately that he was more than a rumor. I learned about the incident through Cactus Wren, a new explorer who joined the restoration through the MYSTcommunity sponsorship program. She saw it with her own two eyes. He was hysterical, it seems, and claimed to have seen Sydney. Recently.

(05/08 16:06:25) Kaelri: Hrm. What was his name again? RT something?
(05/08 16:06:46) Cactus Wren: Ranting Thespian? Something like that. “Thespian”, anyway.
(05/08 16:09:10) Cactus Wren: Some in this conversation last night were advocating a complete re-abandonment of exploration… if the D’ni had abandoned the City, we had no right to occupy or explore it.
(05/08 16:14:33) Kaelri: I’d like to meet this man.

I immediately contacted Chloe Rhodes. If anyone could confirm a Sydney sighting, it was her. Unfortunately, I received no response; she must have been on her way out of the cavern. So, I proceeded to Ae’gura on foot.

Read the rest of this entry »

As you can see, we’ve moved! (My apologies to Uru Blogs readers for the duplicate posts that showed up in the feed.) The reason is very simple: WordPress kick’s Blogger’s posterior all over the place. After helping Renata set up her own blog – which I encourage you to read, if you want to see the Ages through the eyes of a true anthropological talent – the advantages of using this elegant and powerful software became clear to me. (I swear they’re not paying me to say this.)

I know the URL is a lot less friendly. That’s the only reason I hesitated to do this. Fortunately, until I can get proper forwarding on my server, there are now homepage links to the Unbound Hearts on two websites:

• Go to Lore (lore.gilgarn.org)
• Go to Uru Blogs (urublogs.com)

If you want to send new people our way, just give them one of those addresses and tell them to click “Unbound Hearts.” Or, better yet, bookmark us.

Beyond that, I hope the benefits will be obvious. The Picasa thumbnails are now working – in all browsers. Our ability to upload pictures, media and HTML content is now unrestricted. I can also open registration for other members of the UH to post on the front page. And as you can see, the importation process was absolutely seamless, so all of the original blog’s posts and comments have been completely preserved.

Feel free to comment. Feedback is important.

Will the person or persons responsible for placing three traffic cones in the Bevin fountain in upright and equidistant positions, please contact me pertaining to the matter of how in the world you did that.

 

If anyone’s interested, I’ve uploaded my entire library of KI photographs, from ’05 to present. It’s separated into two albums. The first, Expeditions, contains the raw images dumped from my KI. The second, Portfolio, holds the select few shots which have undergone careful CS4 processing.

As you can probably see, I also added a gadget to display the image feed on the right side of this blog. It’s a bit limited, though; it doesn’t allow me to specify the album, nor the picture order. If there are any other Picasa users out there, I’d be grateful for any advice.

Update: Apparently the display gadget fails dramatically in Webkit browsers. I’ll keep working on it.

(I’m not dead, just nightmarishly busy with surface affairs. I hope to have some cavern time next weekend, though. I am far from done with certain persons’ encyclopedic knowledge and sexy accent, respectively.)

(OOC: Spoilers below. Do not read before completing Ahnonay.)

Last night, Clyde and I guided Araxia through her Ahnonay journey. Araxia has turned out to be a hell of a quick study, and it took her only a few hours – putting my first time to shame, I must say. And of course, her face and giddy laughter when she finally pressed that last button were beyond priceless. Another day, another convert.

However, we were especially eager to get Araxia’s perspective on the Age because of one of its enduring mysteries: gravity. Where we stand, both inside the mobile structure, and out at the edge, in Kadish’s office, the force of gravity is obviously downward and Earth-like. Yet the raging water column curves away, both above and below, suggesting a torus structure, much like Catherine’s infamous Age. The puzzle was this: at the very center of such a structure, where its mass is pulling equally from all sides, the net gravitational force is supposed to be zero. The water accelerates as it comes in from above, and picks up enough momentum to carry on through the center and out into space. But we, already at the center and standing still, should be more or less weightless.

My first theory was that a larger mass was situated below us, providing direct downward gravity even when the net force of the torus is zero. But this presented all kinds of other problems: how would the water maintain its cycle without being caught in the parent body’s field? Why doesn’t the torus itself fall and collide with it? Is it in some kind of orbit, and if so, why doesn’t its velocity skew the water column to one side? The concept was convoluted at best, and would have been hell to Write. A simpler solution had to exist.

That’s when we realized our obvious mistake. Of course, we must be centered horizontally, which is why we weren’t drifting towards the inner walls of the torus. But there was no reason why we had to be centered vertically. The structure is simply built closer to the top of the inner column – the torus’s center of mass is still below us, and, with the right distribution of volume, produces a normal Earth-like g-force at this spot. Meanwhile, the water column surges on downward (or rather, inward), regardless of the mobile structure’s minor interference.

Some curiosities remain. We still have no idea how to account for Ahnonay’s constant and uniform light source. Clyde is also preoccupied with the water column itself, which seems to display two overlapping spiral currents; a spiral pattern is to be expected with a draining system of this nature, but to have two discrete and opposing layers is extremely peculiar. One day, I suppose, we’ll tackle these challenges. Until then, Ahnonay shall remain the Age that keeps on giving.

For archival purposes, this is Vormaen’s original introduction & invitation to new members of the Unbound Hearts, posted to the DRC forum on March 12^th, 2007. I only reread it after writing and posting our revised manifesto, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the two line up pretty closely. Perhaps our role has not changed as much as I’d worried. Full article after the jump.

By the way, for readers of Uru Blogs and other syndications, I apologize for flooding the feed with all these self-serving diatribes. I’m pretty sure this is the last of the current salvo.

I know that quite a few don’t always see eye to eye with me and my opinions. I also know that many have their groups that they are a part of.

I created the Unbound Hearts of D’ni years ago to try and stop the shifting of too much power going to one side or the other. I know that some of you might think I am jumping the gun, but it is still a possiblity here. We dwell in an unknown world where power is relatively untapped, and can be harnessed for good or evil. Many times in the past there were attempts to force feed us the need to choose sides. If there’s one thing I learned from Cyan and their interpretations of the journals, is that when given the choice between one or the other, the truly unbound can go beyond such choices, and find another.

Perfect example. In Cyan’s Myst V, it was presented to the player that they could either choose Yeesha, or Escher. Things were too black and white, and neither was the right choice. The player stepped out of the bounds of right or wrong, and made a choice that resolved so much. Breaking boundries and making compromises can solve more than splitting our community. There are only a handful of us in the group now, but we are just looking for people that want to think outside of the box. I cherish this community as much as any of you, and I feel with the combined effort of others, we can achieve so much, without wars or conflict, no matter how unavoidable they may be.

Don’t mistaken this hood as my hood, because it is not. It belongs to all that join. It has full access the the Great Zero, Tsogal, and to our own city instance, so the need for solice is available and held in high regard. The group is also there to assist ANYONE that comes asking for help, be it with ages or questions about their surroundings or the D’ni history. Anyone that would like to join can contact myself, Halcyon, or Kaelri.

Please, I do ask for no harsh criticism. I am just openly inviting people to join, and I will not question why this hood or this hood was created, and I’d hope that respect will be returned. I hope to hear from you folks soon. Take care.

I’ve finished a new and improved About article for this site. If you’ve been wondering who on earth we are and what we’re doing here, please do have a look!

(An OOC version is also available.)