Metaplanar Babel

I could be doing something worthwhile with my time while the WoW servers are down, but instead, I’m sitting here, trying to remember what I was thinking about on my drive home. See, I had this interesting, profound thought on the way home that I was going to blog about, but alas, now it has flown away, probably to be lost forever. No matter, I suppose one can always talk about nothing in the absence of the profound.

I’m a little dismayed to find myself out of reading material. After finishing Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince and Snow Crash, I’m left with nothing to read and no real thoughts as to where to go next. I did stumble upon an interesting passage in Snow Crash that, in my infinite vanity, I’m considering quoting over in the sidebar because it vaguely relates to my semi-random blog title.

Babel is a gateway in our minds, a gateway that. . .gave us the ability to think - moved us from a materialistic world to a dualistic world - a binary world - with both a physical and a spiritual component.

I find this quote interesting mostly because it very much follows the idea behind my blog title. Metaplanes.net came about as a domain because my husband and I were interested in so many other “worlds”, like Barsaive, an alternate (?) future, Norrath, Azeroth, and any number of others. In Shadowrun, the Metaverse is the magical term for the infinite span of universes, or planes, in existence. Amusingly, in Snow Crash, the Metaverse is simply a vision of the evolution of the Internet. Anyway, I always considered “metaplanes” to simply be a synonym for the Metaverse. The site itself could be considered one of my gateways into not only the digital or binary world, but all the other various “worlds” out there in cyberspace. Kind of an ironic thing, since I mostly latched onto the Babel aspect of my title because 1) I can’t concentrate on any one topic, so I tend to speak multiple “languages” (computer-speak, gamer-speak, etc) and 2) quite simply because I babble on endlessly (as you are all seeing right now) at times. Anyway, I really liked the line from the book because it seems to fit so well with my own thoughts for my site. As I said, it’s a bit of vanity to think that those lines are almost tailor-made for my site, but I guess we all have our little quirks.