Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
In some early bout of nostalgia, over the last few days I've been playing a bit of the game "Slither.io". For those of you who don't remember, in the late '10s there was a fad for "IO" games: simple multiplayer games which utilised new features available in HTML5 to make full games run natively in browsers without plugins like Flash or Unity. There was no real unity between them, bar that they used the top-level domain of .io, another innovation of the World-Wide-Web reformations which came along around the same time as HTML5. Slither.io was the first major game which first made IO games "a thing", and consists simply of you controlling a "snake" which gets longer the more you eat, and dies if you hit another snake. It is basically the MMO version of the oldschool snake game (although not constrained to a square-grid) and works really well as a simple & intuitive action game. (You can of course play it for free at slither.io or on the app)
The game, like all well-designed games, has a level of emergent complexity despite its simplicity; with the experience of one "round" (~5mins) roughly dividing itself into three stages:
The anaconda stage is interesting, because as you develop into a bigger and bigger anaconda, at some point your field of view becomes so great, and your tail becomes so long that you can fully encircle multiple snakes without ever even appearing on their screens, meaning they won't have any indication that they are encircled until it is too late. I call this the "leviathan" stage. Once encircled, you create a "closed space" from which nothing can enter or leave. Although I'm not sure the game really works like this, in principle there the law of conservation of energy should apply and the combined energy of all encircled snakes will, in time, become assimilated into you. It doesn't matter if snakes inside you eat eachother, or even if several smaller encirclements form within you: all of it can be counted as "your energy". Slowly, slowly the leviathan closes her trap, circling around in increasingly small arcs. Often what happens is that the outer snakes will be killed by the inner snakes as they flee from the encroaching wall, leaving one or two big snakes sitting in the centre: but nothing can save them from their fate.
I like this part of the game: its a reward for managing to get that far into a round. You are granted "god-like" powers to form your own personal little realm within which snakes live out their entire little slithery lives, but in the end all of their energy is owed to you and you will collect soon enough. It's like life in a petri-dish, or an ant-farm, or indeed one of those "closed jar ecosystems" you see people make videos about on youtube. An entire self-contained "world" closed off from outside influences and beholden to an apocalypse common to her inhabitants, but not universal with those without its bounds. Our planet it like this, surrounded by vast depths of vacuum as it is: we are (mostly) an enclosed system beholden to an eventual collective fate. Within our planet we create smaller contained worlds which, sometimes fully self-contained in and of themselves to some degree like countries, cities, or even individual buildings. The other way our planet is part of the larger closed system of the Sun, which is in turn contained within the Milky Way and so on. Concentric circles of spinning snakes eating their own tails as they slowly constrict their prey despite being prey themselves. Eventually the great universal leviathan which encircles all will constrict the whole universe and devour it, leaving just himself behind. In the Mediterranean they call him "Oceanus", in Borea they call him "[TODO]". The story of Genesis too is full of closed systems. Adam & Eve are given dominion of Eden: a "good" closed-system within which they could operate in "freedom", that is without the threat of an constricting leviathan. However an evil serpent tricked them into leaving, and thus they were thrust into the "worldly world", our world, around which that serpent now encircles whose name is "Satan".
This model of the universe as concentric closed-systems is reductive I know, in the real world the snakes are membranes of varying permeability. Soon mankind will find a way to break out from the Earth-snake, and expand our race into outer space. The inner snakes can kill the enclosing serpent through effort (St George/NASA), or it can be killed by an external "serpent-slaying" force (St Michael/UFOs). The serpent can also simply choose not to constrict, allowing life inside their realm to continue without impact from them and safe from outside forces. However this security can only last for as long as the serpent which encloses your serpent doesn't constrict itself. Unlike in Slither.io the rules of the real world are complex and unknown, but like the game we cannot have the whole picture and sometimes we are kept trapped by forces so powerful they exist completely outside of our view, slowly strangling us while we squabble over scraps in a petri-dish.
