Scales of Law and Chaos or Why I blog.

One of my favorite computer games is Dominions. You take command of a powerful supernatural ruler fight other Pretender Gods to become master of the world. In the first edition , the player picked between 14 nations and customize his pretender's

• Physical form
• Magical power
• Dominion.

A pretender's dominion was his sphere of influence and what his sphere of influence looks like. Most Pretenders to Ermor would spread death, magic, and cold as their undead legion conquered countries. I played Ulm with a pretender that spread the opposite, life, order, and stability.

Ulm sat directly north of Ermor on my favorite battlefield map and it often came down to my thin black line of pikemen backed by a dozen clerics and mages facing down massed undead and necromancers.

The battle was not just about troops and spells, the dominion raised or lowered your troops' morale. Fortresses needed to be built or magic items made to supply troops in regions tilted toward the death scale. Cold and heat affected fatigue. Simply put, the pretenders fought to reshape the world.

When I stepped back from the game, I had a crude, but simple and quick stat to describe the world. My friends and I would joke about a 5th level player or a computer programmer level 3 or a drum 'n bass dancer level 9, but it made sense to us. I look at dynamic and divergent America and see a scale leaning 1 out of 3 toward Chaos, but also leaning toward life, productivity, and creativity. Japan is 3 on the order scale and high on productivity, but lower on creativity [1].

In the current Japan or '60s America, rebellion was obvious and easy. Dress differently and read differently than the mainstream. What happens when the body of water you paddling in becomes a lake? There is no guiding flow. The suburbanite life script has been spliced with a hodge podge of Eastern philosophy, a mega-dose of individualism, and seasonings of the bohemian.

Think you're tough because you have a tattoo? So does the cashier at Starbucks. Piercings? Pagoda anyone? Goth, emo, punk, grunge, go to Spencers. Once society at large moves towards the chaotic end of the scale and the strictures on behavior are removed, moving against the gentle flow of the mainstream is an aimless motion. In fact, the larger problem becomes drift. A purpose driven life becomes more attractive.

To have drive, discipline becomes necessary and self discipline becomes a necessary components to freeing oneself from the malaise of drift. Discipline can lead to freedom, that is why I blog.

[1] This may seem like a contradiction to an anime fan, but there are many reasons that are tied to why one likes anime. There are the Asian aspect and 20 years of untapped archives that I talked about in the Tao of the Otaku. All of those years of animation and drawing experience has created an unrivaled industry in both fields. However, Japan also publishes its defense white papers [2] in manga format and has a shouta mascot for their armed forces; that is, their other fields of creativity suffer.

Talent is being funneled into manga and anime that would go into prose, acting, and other fields in America and other countries. South Korea's movie making industry is growing as are their attempts at sequential art and animation. I believe that American and other Far East Asian industries will mature and rival the Japanese.

[2] The white papers discuss the official Japanese military's stance on territorial and other issues and the character of their response. Most modern countries publish one. This is one way how the People's Republic of China (former commie bandits, now ruthless capitalists) and the USA communicate their stances on the Republic of China (Taiwan).