More G Moe

GMOs how can I make it clear.  It is like this: you need to eat food, or you will die.  When you eat food you chew it up and swallow it. It goes into you stomach and powerful acids and enzymes break up the food and send it into your intestines.  There, the food further breaks down into molecule sized chunks and pass through the cell walls into your bloodstream and then they go to your cells.  There are other processes that involve insulin and the liver, but what is important is that the molecules are broken down into useful components, carbohydrates (like sugars), fats, and amino acids.  Carbohydrates are things that the things that made the food used to store energy, generally plants store carbs and animals store fats, but plants also store energy as fats too.  It is just energy and it is generally universally useful, but it is devoid of anything important, besides energy—which is important.  

There are twenty-two amino acids.  Twenty of them are used in DNA.  That is it.  The 22 are used to make every protein in your body and every other protein in every other life form on earth.  DNA, as I said previously is made of amino acids and is thus a protein.  When a protein gets digested it torn into amino acids by enzymes (which are also proteins) and reused by your cells to make more cells and more DNA, or it is used to make proteins that your body needs to function, like insulin and enzymes.  

DNA.  If you breakdown any section of DNA you will have a bunch of amino acids, twenty different kinds of them and they can be configured in many ways to make many strips of DNA.  DNA make proteins that make other proteins that do things in the body, plant bodies and animal bodies alike.  That's it.  That is why GMOs mean nothing to the body.  Nothing at all, because all things that are digested, GMO and nonGMO alike and the body can't tell what the source of the amino acids were, because once it enters that stage of the digestion process identity is gone.  Hell, once it is all chewed up and a slurry in the intestines, you can't tell the source of the proteins.  The only thing that some GMOs have that can survive the digestion process is secondary metabolites, but most things have them so it is not really a big thing.  

What is a secondary metabolite?  It is something that a body produces that has an effect on the body that can have an effect on something that eats them.  Like drug effects.  Eat a plant or mushroom and boom you have a wild or fun time, or boom you are dead.  Mushrooms are famous for these different and similar effects.  But tobacco, marijuana, and opium come from plants and many poisons are derived from plants too.  It is a matter of dose for most things: a little is harmless, more causes an effect, too much causes death.  These thresholds are different for everything and person.  For example, there is corn that has been modified to make BT.  BT is actually a bacteria, Bacillus thuringiensis, and when it is digested by insects it binds with various important enzymes and causes the insect to die.  In humans it has no effect, because the enzyme is not present in mammals or birds and reptiles, so no death.  

Fish DNA added to tomatoes to make them more frost resistant is a sequence of DNA that creates a antifreeze that protects the fruit naturally that does not affect the taste and does not make the tomato inedible, because fish have had the same DNA for millions of years and are not inedible either.  

Round up ready crops are plants that are granted immunity to Roundup, a chemical that binds enzymes in plants.  The binding of the enzymes kills the plants, but the Roundup Ready plants have DNA that uses a different enzyme to do the same process and is not bound by the Roundup.  

What GMO plants are allowing us to do is increase food production, by increasing the yield of the crop.  They increase the nutrient content.  They reduce the dependence on chemical fertilizers.  They reduce the toxins added to crops as pesticides.  Roundup affects only plants and looses its effectiveness quickly in the soil.  BT crops only affect the insects that eat the crop, whereas BT spray affects all insects near the plant.

GMO is the future.  It will allow us to grow more food on less land and feed more people than our current foods can with better nutrition and grown on more marginal lands to boot.  

Caranus, the start of a novel

In my novel, the main character is a girl.  She has been chosen by the Goddess of the Blue Sun to be her representative in Caranus.  She has been born with it and no one knows it.  There is one thing that is a clue to anyone who knows anything, which no one does, is that she can see the Blue Sun.  Which no-one else can because Rayleigh Scattering scatters its light and it is thus invisible to everyone but her.  She, however, does not know this and grows up knowing that there are three suns.  Of course, since most people only know about the two, when ever she points this out she is disciplined or outcast because everyone can see only two suns, it is as evident as the nose on her face.  So she can see the Blue Sun.  And she is gifted.  Very gifted.  She can learn everything as if she is gifted in that one thing.  So she as a youngster went out exploring from her farm on the Great Finger of God lake and she encountered a tree, she climbed it and fell, because she had no experience in climbing trees, but later she tried to climb more trees and she figured out how to climb trees.  Then later she encountered a cliff face and tried to climb it, it was like a tree, so soon she was at the top.  Later in her life she has to climb a wall that is smooth as glass, but a smooth wall is like a cliff so up she would go.  Also this girl has no preconceptions and she does not make them.  She grows up with fairy tales about horrible beasts and monsters, but she sees them as what they are lessons to teach.  When she later in life sees a bunch of Orcs beside a river, her companions react as if these are a menace that needs to be destroyed and begin to do so, she glances at them and sees three women washing their clothes with some children playing games in the bushes nearby.  The bridge where her companions see a group of hobgoblins waiting in ambush, she sees ensignia on their lapels and the coat of arms on their chest.  She sees that there is a barrier that can be moved with a cantilever system and she sees that bridge is brand new.  She concludes that this bridge was just built by the neighbouring nation and they are collecting tolls, maybe this is the boarder and they are taxing travelers.  The preconceptions of the group inform their every action, born without preconceptions means she approaches everything with the availible information only.  That is a major superpower!  

She was born in mid summer, so in the Northern Clime that she lives that means she at the age of 7, she is in late autumn and the summers are short, almost too short for the the last harvest before the Winter.  She spends her days trying to get out of her school duties which are boring to her, because she can read better than her teachers and do her sums just as well.  The outside world is more dynamic and is filled with more than what is in the books, like mud, trees, and bugs.  She has noticed that some of the little bugs are tiny fire breathing dragons.  She has also discovered that she can climb trees and likes it very much, because people don't look up when they go looking for her, because girls never climb trees.  A few weeks ago she met a friend from the forest.  He was a furry little boy from a village of furry people deeper in the woods.  Her friends from home and her parents might call them Bugbears, but she can quite clearly see that he is a boy and he is from a village of other people.  At first she can not understand him, but she soon starts understanding him by asking him what things are and swearing.  There is a special thrill knowing how to swear in a different language no one else understands.  A few days after first meeting him she follows him into the deeper woods and finds where he lives.  There are hunters and people who gather food from the woods.  There are women with children and a school, except this school is cool, because they are teaching a different language and they use a different alphabet, only she learns that it is symbols that they are teaching and not a language.  She figures that out in a couple of visits when she sees the use of the runes; they are magic!  She sees the warriors applying mud to their fur and smoothing it out and runes applied that she recognizes mean health, strength and toughness.  She sees them harden the mud and turn into tough gray skin.  Now e warriors look like Trolls.  She sees now the totems around the village that were meant to keep people from finding this place and how they would push people away mentally.  But they did not work on her.  Because she is too young to be fooled, that's it.

On her last trip she is shown a great story written with runes written on a strange disc fragment.  The village elder tells her that they had spent their entire lives journeying into the north from their homeland to deliver the story of the great Prophesy.  They talk to her for many hours and they are saddened as they learn that their message may fall on deaf ears.  They send her away and tell her she has been gone from her people too long and they will be looking for her.  They give her one of the fragments of the disc and wish her a long life.  

When she returns, she finds that there have been searchers looking for her for most of the day.  They question her and she responds truthfully and tells them that she was in the other village in the woods.  The adults get concerned and send her back home.  She is kept indoors that night and the following day.  The next morning she is allowed to leave and she sees the bodies of some of the villagers she considered friends including the young boy.  The people are talking about finding a nest of bugbears and trolls and exterminating as many as they could catch.  They were surprised at this they had thought that they were just myths and stories to tell children to frighten them.  Our hero is beside herself with grief and most of the adults think she is scared until she hugs the boy and cries.  The townsfolk think this is a bad sign and her parents decide that she has to leave and go to the Winter home in the city early.  

This is a farming community.  The community is only habitable in the late spring through late Autumn as the winters last 7-8 years.  The community leaves for the city on the coast where the winter is not as bad.  How bad does it get?  One winter in the past the water froze down to a depth of 30meters.  The Finger of God lake is very deep and very long, nearly 100km wide and about 400km long.  Barges travel it all the time in the summer bringing wheat and other vegetables to the coast, but the journey often takes longer than a month.    She is sent with her grandmother, a very very old woman, to Founder City, on the Treacherous Coast.  She is slightly more happy about this after a few days, because her grandmother is I'll and she has more free reign and there are lots of new things to see on the journey.  She does overhear a few conversations about what happened in the town before she left, about the Bugbears and the Trolls; they also talked about her reactions to them as well.  Things turn bad for her Grandmother's health.  The weather is colder as the long Autumn has spells of winter where the lake freezes over, but not for long, until the later autumn when it is frozen 'til Spring.  So her grandmother dies in one of the cold spells of Autumn.  

She arrives in the city at the docks a different person.  Something bad had happened with her grandmother gone, it has left her, disturbed, and different than the carefree child of a month ago.  She had watched the barge pass through the great locks at the North end of the lake in the mountains.  The great lock was made of some great sheet of steel coloured black as coal, but she was only half aware of it.  The way down the river through the great  black barked evergreens might have been a cause for her to look on them with wonder, they grew so tall that their tops were shrouded in the clouds… which really was not that high up because there was a constant fog on the river that rarely rose above a couple hundred meters, but even then, the trees rose higher.  She did not once think about climbing them.  The arrival in the city was uneventful, there was a drizzle, the kind that get everything wet, that will even soak through the best oil cloak if given time and the travel along the river had given the rain that time.  She came ashore at the docks alone.  No one was there to greet her.  No one knew she was coming, her chaperone, her Grandmother, dead over a month ago.  She did not trust the men of the barge, she would not ask them for help.  She was dumped as unwanted cargo on the wharf left to moulder.  

She left the dock and ventured into the city.

Winter passes.  Lots of stuff happens in the city, chapters in fact.  Nothing about what happened on the trip, but you can see how the experiences inform her.  Living on the street, constantly cold and wet.  Always seeking dryer places.  Learning that it is better to be thought of as a boy than a girl and learns to disguise her gender, first she is bad as anyone who has never done this sort of thing but quickly she is better than any and has all the other boys believing that she is a real boy.  Winter is long, late Autumn plus 6 years of Winter and then early Spring.  Eight years, she is now 15, maturity delayed due to poor diet comes rushing on her.  There is conflict, but she escapes it briefly, and finds herself in a small line of people seeking employment as bearers.  By chance she is selected. 

 It's not chance.  It is Prophesy.  Between each chapter is a small chapter with the story of how her people came to this new land and the hardships they endured.  It starts 400 years before, 200 years before her people reach the shores where they live now.  It details how a great empire far away collapsed and the refugees settled in this distant land—all because the promised one was to be born of their people, in this distant land

Caranus in my dreams

Lately I have been thinking about Caranus.  Not Exalted.

Caranus was first meant to be a world setting for D&D when I first thought of it.  It was a large map with two continents, there was a fantastically long history thanks to Tolkien.  But not like Tolkien, like something else.  It was a world where all the boundaries were pushed away.  There were three suns and six moons, the world was as large as Saturn and it had a true orbit of 25 years and seasonal variation of one year in length.  The world improved as I learned more and more about how the real world and the universe works.  Like two of the suns are locked in an orbit around themselves and they in turn orbit a third sun.  The orbit takes a year to complete and this variation in the light level creates a mild season effect, but the inhabitants who are not an advanced culture don't know this, they think there are 24 years to a real year because of sidereal motion.  Complicated, but just look sidereal days in a year for Earth, it is 366.25 not 365.25.  That is fine because it means that the true seasons last about six years each and not 6.25.  Happy coincidence I assure you, I did not plan it.  

Anyways there are gods, nine of them, three goddesses with two consorts each.  Each of the goddesses is represented by one of the suns, there is a red sun, a green sun and a blue sun.  Initiates into the religions of the goddesses  learns a secret about the goddess.  The goddess of Magic is the blue sun.  Due to Reighleigh Scattering, all the blue light is scattered, and so, the blue sun is invisible all the time.  Imagine, looking up at a clear blue sky and seeing no sun at all!  That would be nuts and cool and terrifying.  You would think that this would be the goddess of thieves, and you would be wrong, since the light is scattered, the light would come from all directions, so there would be no shadows.  There are lots of secrets you might have based on this.

The Green goddess's sun would appear as a yellow sun because of the scattering, so the first secret would be that.  The second secret is that she is not a friend of plants, because plants reflect green light, and they don't absorb it.  So this might be the goddess for thieves and murderers.  The Red sun, is exactly what they appear to be and that light gets absorbed by plants, along with the Blue light.  When there is an eclipse of the other suns, the red sun's Light turns vegetation black, so many people call the red sun the goddess of death, which she is, because she is the goddess of life and rebirth, so death as well.  

The six consorts, the gods are more universally worshiped, but they are worshipped in pieces, for example the consorts of the red sun are worshiped as the god of corn harvest, and the god of the apple harvest, the gods of hunting, the gods decay, and the seasons and many more.  The gods of the Green Sun handle her list of previews and the consorts of the Blue Sun goddess handle her previews.   There are only nine true deities, but there are hundreds of faces of each.  A high level priest would learn much over his advancement about how the world really works as they gain power.  They would look at the world differently than they did as a child.  

The yearly weather depends on the proximity of the red and the green stars in relation to the planet, the blue Sun's light is stable throughout.  The furthest away it is the cooler the day.  Also the suns rotate around each other, a dance in the sky, and there is a subtle variation because of this.  The true seasons are brought on by an axial tilt, just like on Earth, but since the transition lasts six years, there is more steady change in the weather.  The seasonsa re more pronounced in the extremes of latitude.  A winter that lasted six years is a lot more devastating than a winter on Earth.  Indeed, unless there were ample stores set aside it would be impossible to live in the extremes full time.  But the summers, six years of near constant daylight would allow a lot of crops to be planted and grown, perhaps enough to hold over the long Autumn through Spring weather.  More temperate climates might have multiple harvest years in the summer and single harvests in the spring and autumns and maybe one harvest all winter long.  The low latitudes have a different problem, extreme heat with 40°C daily averages and high humidity too.  And jungles where the daytime highs hit 60° that almost instantly turn into daily downpours that last hours.  

Mountain ranges that scrape the sky at airplane heights.  With a backbone mountain range that continues without break and without passes for tens of thousands of kilometers— the only breaks are tunnels build through them.  The mountain range is shadowed by a great river called the Great River not because of poor imagination, but because it is so… so great.  Stretches from lakes in the unbearable south, it courses north picking up tributaries larger than the Nile.  Navigable for almost its entire length it widens more and more until seeing across it is impossible.  Nations are rubbed clean as its meanders push down its length.  Cities die as they are left dry when the river moves.  Fish that live in the river found in one place are different from fish found in another. Its great estuary is a vast changing subarctic marsh, where the warm waters meet a cold ocean and blanketing the entire region in a thick fog.  Hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, millions, but with a ecosystem that supports many marsh bound nations.

I dream that I might have a story to place in this world so that I can describe it more fully in a novel.  One day perhaps.

Game running blahs

I might be getting tired of running my Exalted game.  I might be tired of running period.  One of my players asked if I would be willing to give up the GMs hat and let him GM, even if it were with his rules.  I responded with a hell yes.  Excuse me a, Hell Yes!!

But really I was thinking of a longer gap.  I have another friend who runs all the other games I play, have played for longer than three sessions, has been ill and when he suggests that we play, my answer is in the affirmative— even though I would like to say no.  His games are too structured, no not that.  His expectations for stunting are too high.  I deliver a stunt and he ignores it.  I try really hard to make something cool in my description and I achieve the lowest stunt possible; it loses the fun for me.  It feels like my friend the GM gets to have all the fun.  His strict adherence to experience means that I never have a powerful character that can do stuff.  His control makes me feel like I am just a pawn in the game.  My playing style does not lend itself to his game.  He complains that I start to become part of the scenery and become a secondary character to his story.  That is how I feel, and that is why I inwardly cringe when he suggests he wants to run a game.  

I ask myself if it is me?  Is it all in my head.  It might be.  It might be that our lives and our desires have diverged more and more over the years and being friends is the reason we are still friends.  I look at our mutual friends and I see I have diverged even further from them in the last two decades.  I am their friend because of my first friend.  Is that enough?  

My friend was dying and I was there for him.  I will likely lie to him and tell him that I have had fun the next time he runs a game.  I am friends with him more than just the games and the two decades of being friends… I love his children too.  

I am tired of running my game.  I am tired of running the game and not playing.  I wish that someone might decide to run, or that it ends.  I hope their style is something that I can play and have fun.  It has been a long time since I have had fun playing in a RPG.  

I begin today to set down the new setting that I want to run.  Who will play in it?  Will Jaguar decide she wants another kick at the can?  Natural20 will play, but she is my love, so she will endure my games to stay close to me.  The Practitioner will likely be good… but if he is too busy that is fine.  I have learned my lesson and won't invite the Schmuck.  After that I don't care.  I might take time off and not run at all.  I don't know.