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Episode 7: How to Make Your Own Plane
128 Plays6 years ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to the Goblin Lore Podcast!
In our seventh episode, the guys run down the lore of artificial planes, including Rath, Phyrexia, Mirrodin, Serra's Realm, and Nicol Bolas's Meditation Realm. Hobbes then brings us into a discussion about mindfulness and making your reality what you want it to be, so you too can feel like a planeswalker in your daily life.
Finally, the winners of the first 100 followers' giveaway have been announced! At 200 followers on Twitter, we'll do our second giveaway, so keep the word of mouth going!
You can find the hosts on Twitter: Joe Redemann at @Fyndhorn, Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @AlexanderNewm. Send questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to @GoblinLorePod on Twitter or GoblinLorePodcast@gmail.com.
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art courtesy of Greg Staples, design by JDR.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Goblin Lore Podcast
00:00:06
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers, and thanks for listening to another episode of Goblin
Exploring Artificial Planes in Magic the Gathering
00:00:11
Speaker
Lore. In this episode we talk about artificial planes in Magic the Gathering and what we can learn from them and the planeswalkers who shaped them about shaping our own lives and our own realities.
00:00:24
Speaker
This episode is coming out a week later than we anticipated because of the run-up to Grand Prix Minneapolis, which the entire cast of Goblin Lore attended, and therefore we had to do a little bit of preparing in order to be good hosts here in Minneapolis. So from this point forward we'll be back on our regularly scheduled programming every week, Friday at around noon. Without any further ado, let's get to the show.
Creating Artificial Planes with Household Items
00:00:51
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers, and welcome to another episode of Goblin Lore. And today's episode, we are talking about how to make your own plane with just a few household items. We're gonna be digging into artificial planes, what their purpose is in the multiverse, where they came from, and what the ability to make a plane out of thin air or duct tape means for our lives in the real world.
00:01:19
Speaker
But before we get there, I am going to turn it over to my co-host to introduce themselves and tell us all what is the building material you would use to create your own plane? Well, I'm Alex. We found at Alexander Newem on Twitter. And you know, right now I'm thinking the material I would probably use is a good memory foam. It might just be because the last week or two have been
00:01:46
Speaker
kind of rough at work, and I'm kind of tired right now, but I think that's where I'm at currently. I like that. Memory foam. Just anywhere you want, you just stop and take a nap. Yeah. Well, I am HobbsQ, and you can find me at HobbsQ on Twitter. For me, I kind of was thinking about this because before we got on air, I was mentioning to the guys, neither of whom have read, well, Alex has read, but it's been a while, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
00:02:12
Speaker
And all I can really think of was Slardy of Artfast, one of my favorite characters of all time, basically telling, like he creates planets for like the uber rich, like the, I mean, they're the ones who create earth to be this giant computer, blah, blah, blah. But one of the things that he's really proud of is the fact that he built the fjords in Norway. And now I really just want to plan it with fjords. Like it's a fun word.
00:02:38
Speaker
fjords look really cool it's i mean i i don't see how this could go bad you guys could combine the two and then you just have one giant like uh water theme park lazy river so like wisconsin yeah it would basically be the wisconsin dells we just alienated a whole bunch of our podcast listeners that don't know anything about the midwest
00:03:00
Speaker
And I'm your host, Joe Retteman. You can find me on Twitter at FinDhorn. That's F-Y-N-D Horn. And I'm gonna just go obvious here. I would make my plane out of duct tape. I used to be one of those grunge kids, one of the, you know,
00:03:17
Speaker
almost emo kids like we were we were like proto emo back in the day and so you know of course we had the like the furry wristband not like furries but like the fluffy wristbands that had like Metallica in stitched on them and we would make wallets out of duct tape we would make like backpack I had somebody a friend of mine made a backpack out of duct tape you know you could do anything with duct tape so that's what I'd go with
00:03:43
Speaker
My friend and I used to do the whole like we never actually LARPed in the sense of like doing role
Nature and Entropy of Artificial Planes
00:03:50
Speaker
-playing. We just made the swords and sword fought and Some people at a like a Kmart. I think literally thought that we were trying to make bombs at one point because we were buying just PVC pipe and insulation foam and
00:04:07
Speaker
Well, what else would you be doing? You wouldn't be larping like some sort of, you know, nerd. Right. I mean, to be fair, in my area, larping was probably the last thing that anybody would have thought. So we played like maybe once or twice, but we wore outfits. I basically was a cosplayer is what I can determine now.
00:04:25
Speaker
Proto cosplayer, too. Proto cosplayer, also. You were much cooler. You got in on a much cooler trend before it happened than I did. Christine Sprankle, better than my chemical romance, in my opinion. Least controversial things set on this cast so far.
00:04:46
Speaker
Let's pivot to our main topic of the night. We're talking about artificial planes, and we've had a long history of planes being made in Magic the Gathering, but we need to first sort of talk about how those come to be. How does a plane happen outside of just a natural plane that shows up?
00:05:07
Speaker
And the first thing is, you know, the definition here is provided by MTG Wiki, so go check that out. It's got a lot of great Vorthos content on there, really good stuff for the most part, and you can edit it if it's wrong, which is even better. But artificial planes are planes created by planeswalkers.
00:05:28
Speaker
Makes sense. Any artificial plane will eventually collapse and all matter in the plane will be converted to energy.
Planeswalkers' Powers: Before and After the Mending
00:05:35
Speaker
Also makes sense if you know about sort of the entropy and chaos energy of our own universe makes sense that the energy of a plane that's sort of like pushed together forcefully rather than naturally would dissipate. I mean, this also kind of shows us too that this is our first kind of real world science analog that we kind of have in the things that we've been discussing, I would say.
00:05:58
Speaker
in this idea that it does appear that for at least some purposes of what we've been talking about, the laws of thermodynamics do apply to the magic of the gathering multiverse.
00:06:08
Speaker
Yeah, which is pretty cool. Like we don't see, I mean, magic is much more of a fantasy property than it is sci-fi, but in this regard, it for sure does go with some of those science rules. Then the definition goes on here, an artificial plane usually contains only one planet or solar system, unlike some other planes, but some planes, such as Sarah's realm, don't contain planets at all.
00:06:33
Speaker
Artificial planes are usually inhabited only by creatures created by the planeswalker or by creatures borrowed and borrowed in air quotes from other planes, which we will also talk about. So, planes, artificial planes get made. They aren't found usually, they are just created. And this was something that used to happen all the time back in the day before a certain event that we like to call the mending. And a real fraud
00:07:01
Speaker
overview, the pre-mending walkers were really powerful. They were god-like power, and that's how they could make planes, these planes that they have that we're going to talk about, and presumably many, many more that just the story never featured because there was a lot of planeswalkers, some of whom decided to make planes and some of whom decided they didn't need to have their own spaces like that or did other things.
00:07:31
Speaker
But then after the mending, well, I mean, there was a large series of Apokolai that all occurred and threatened to crack the multiverse. And so once that stuff was all resolved, it seemed... And I think the future site, the Time Spiral Block books talk about this a little bit, and I think some of it's kind of just story hand-wavy in the background.
History of Phyrexia and its Influence
00:07:57
Speaker
But the universe kind of balanced out a little bit and said, OK, these people aren't going to be this powerful anymore. And that's where we get the neowalkers now. All the new planeswalkers are just like normal people who can go to other planes. And now being able to go to other planes gives them access to other things, especially as mages, that can give them some extra power, some more diverse spells and things. So they will generally be more powerful than a random person on a normal planet.
00:08:27
Speaker
But they aren't by their very nature, like the old planeswalkers, when they sparked, now they have godlike power. These, it's a little bit more, you gotta work for your power. And that actually brings us right into our first plane profile. So I'm gonna turn the keys over on the planar portal device to you, Alex, to talk about Porexia.
00:08:51
Speaker
All right. Well, in Phyrexia, and this is, we need to differentiate now because we have new Phyrexia, which in a manner of speaking, you'll be talking about a little bit later. The original Phyrexia that Yagmuth used was an artificial plane created by an unnamed planeswalker. We don't actually know who made it.
00:09:14
Speaker
According to what MTG Wiki has here, he was a humanoid that preferred the form of a dragon, and his plane was found by Diafed, who was a planeswalker who was from the Front Empire and decided to go back to the Empire after planeswalking around for a while.
00:09:31
Speaker
ended up finding, she could tell there was a planeswalker somewhere in her old, you know, this old kingdom that she used to live in. And so she decided to go looking for him. And that leads into a whole story in the Thrawn, which was really interesting. I really enjoyed that book. But she found Phyrexia. And when she was working with Yawgmoth, he was looking for a place, kind of a refuge to bring these people who were sick that he claimed he was helping.
00:09:58
Speaker
When in reality he was just experimenting on them. So she introduced him to Phyrexia and she created a portal that allowed him to bring all of these people to this plane that was not all that different from Mirrodin actually after its creation. The planet was an artificial world.
00:10:18
Speaker
There wasn't really living things. It was metal and like oil and all of this machinery and things that kind of didn't really know what it was for because it was just left there. Ultimately, Yawgmoth, because he liked to experiment with people and learn how things worked.
00:10:37
Speaker
turned it into a lot of the Phyrexians that we later saw, but the fusion between machine and living creatures. And then eventually launched the war on Dominaria, and that led into the invasion cycle where the original Phyrexia was actually destroyed by Urza.
00:10:59
Speaker
And it's interesting to me too, just as a little footnote on that, a great description, it's interesting to me too that Phyrexia's, one of Phyrexia's other like sort of dominating features is that it's got nine spheres and it's basically, like it's a Russian nesting doll full of horrible, horrible things the closer and closer you get to the middle. And the middle is just Yawgmoth controlling the very fabric of reality.
00:11:26
Speaker
But like, you know, it is essentially just Dante's Inferno put into magic. It's great. It's just hell. It's magic hell. Oh, yeah. So with Phyrexia, the home of the big bad knocked out here, let's sort of pivot to the little sister, basically, of Phyrexia, Yawgmoth's pet projects, almost his like summer plane, Wrath.
00:11:51
Speaker
Yeah, so Wrath is really, I think is really interesting. I think this is like a fascinating idea for a thing. So this was an artificial plane created by Yawgmoth. It was created out of a material called flow stone, which was really kind of flexible in what it could turn into. I see that described as semi sentient, which I don't entirely know what that means, but it's interesting. And it was created
00:12:20
Speaker
Kind of in the shadow of Dominaria because the final invasion that happened during the invasion block phase one was planar portals for exe and troops come in but phase two was the plane of wrath.
00:12:35
Speaker
because it was artificial and made out of this flowstone material, was actually overlaid onto Dominaria. So that entire legions of Phyrexian troops were just placed in the middle of key locations. There isn't a lot of details about how Yawgmoth actually made this. Talks about how he created this forge to make the flowstone and was able to kind of put this here. And we know Yawgmoth was powerful, despite the fact that he wasn't a planeswalker.
00:13:05
Speaker
So, and then it also led to some interesting things. The overlay of wrath onto Dominaria led to some interesting things that we see even in the most recent Dominaria set through, like the Sky Shroud Forest was a feature on wrath that laid over where the, where Keld is, these red barbarians. So suddenly you have these, the green elves, the red barbarians,
00:13:27
Speaker
Their homeland is in the same place. And because of the invasion, there's all these zombies and phyrexians going on. They're like, all right, let's team up and fight. And then afterwards, that's where you get Radha. Her family goes back to those original human barbarians and Sky Shroud elves who came together to form something
Sarah's Realm and its Corruption
00:13:50
Speaker
new out of this big disaster.
00:13:53
Speaker
So another old, artificial plane that we see a little bit in the stories, it plays a key role in the stories, but we're not there long, is Sarah's Realm. And Sarah was a planeswalker, a white-aligned planeswalker, you know,
00:14:10
Speaker
notoriously she is worshipped by angels and in Dominaria's set and story we see that there is the Church of Sera which is a you know a thing that's passed down from generations and generations ago of this sort of cult of personality around Sera the Planeswalker and she built this world Sera's realm
00:14:34
Speaker
basically to be almost the exact opposite of Phyrexia, you know, where Phyrexia is completely black aligned, all black mana, you know, oil, you know, nine spheres of hell. Sarah's realm is an artificial plane that has basically no structure to it, no situated flat land to rest on. There are all these floating platforms, these sky castles, these clouds, you know, and it's just this expansive
00:15:03
Speaker
heaven place basically. Sarah created all these angels to populate it. There are humans there. We're not exactly sure if Sarah brought them from somewhere else or if she created the humans as well. This features mostly in the Ursa saga stories.
00:15:20
Speaker
basically Urza comes there to ask Sarah for help with you know dealing with Phyrexia and finding Phyrexia and all of that and she kind of goes nah I'm just gonna hang out here because you know it would suck to get involved basically same logic as Teferi it's would suck to get involved this place is great I'm gonna keep this in perfect balance what happens though is the Phyrexians attack and invade
00:15:46
Speaker
into Sera's realm bringing this black mana corrupting the realm and with what we see another part of artificial planes is that when they are unbalanced from their structure it's really hard to get them back into balance and so that that instant presence of black mana throws everything off and Urza realizes this is his one
00:16:09
Speaker
thing that is good about him in this story, he realizes that the plane is going to corrupt and collapse and die anyways.
Mirrodin's Transformation into New Phyrexia
00:16:17
Speaker
And so what he does is he collapses the entire realm into the Power Stone that then he puts in the engine of the Skyship Weatherlight. And that's how we sort of get into modern day Weatherlight and Sarah's realm where it is in the Dominaria story.
00:16:34
Speaker
which is also why, when you see early in the Dominaria story, they talk about this a little bit, but I love, as a very quick aside, I hope, in the most recent stories, how they will have these little pieces that, if you know the deep story, it pays off, but if you don't, it's okay, because they don't dwell on it. They kind of just keep telling the story, but early on, like Tiana,
00:16:57
Speaker
shows up to help with the weather light and this core and they're talking about it as a holy item for the church. She was there to retrieve it for the church because it is not just a sacred item that is important, it is literally Sarah's realm.
00:17:15
Speaker
And that then moves us into, I'm sort of going chronologically through these, this moves us now into our next artificial plane, which is Mirrodin, or New Phyrexia. New Phyrexia now is the former Mirrodin, which was before that, Argentum, a plane made entirely out of silver. And, go figure.
00:17:40
Speaker
This is a plane that was created by Karn, who is a silver golem. And Argentum, you know, if you don't know, is a Latin word. It comes from the Latin meaning silver. Ah, clever, clever magic. But Karn created this basically, this mathematically perfect world made of silver, renamed, eventually it was renamed after the Marari by Memnarch, who was the Marari.
00:18:09
Speaker
He created these sort of golem watch beings to just sort of take care of Mirrodin. There were a couple of moons of Mirrodin that each had different ties to different mana colors. There was no
00:18:25
Speaker
Green sun until we get to the fifth dawn story when it emerges So the interesting thing about meredin is it was completely artificial. It was every every flower every blade of grass every Tree was made of metal. I mean oceans were quicksilver you know, they have razor grass fields and eventually when
00:18:51
Speaker
creatures.
00:19:10
Speaker
Once those get all reset, the elders of Mirrodin, you know, flashback to their home planes and then everything is left in chaos and all this sort of stuff. And Karn himself brought glistening oil from the Phyrexian invasion, corrupt the plane and the plane now has, you know, over time become new Phyrexia, sort of fractured into five different color-aligned factions.
00:19:35
Speaker
Which is really, and there's some really cool things I think they did with it, to differentiate these Phyrexians from the original ones. The original Phyrexians, as they were essentially made in Yawgmoth's image, or at least his ideas of what he wanted to do, they were like black, just black. Because that's kind of where he was. But these Phyrexians are like, natural-ish?
00:20:00
Speaker
like sort of like they developed in this symbiosis with a natural world, with a natural and artificial world. And so they sort of grew organically into the five colors because Mirrodin as a world had all five colors of mana present and lots of it in the heart of Mirrodin. And so I think it's interesting how you kind of had these divisions within the within Phyrexia now, because they sort of had a more natural growth as opposed to having a single person
00:20:30
Speaker
who was engineering the whole thing.
Bolas's Meditation Realm and Strategic Importance
00:20:33
Speaker
Also, as another quick funny, like, wizards, I see what you did there, the phyrexian symbol, that circle with a slash through it, that is the Greek letter phi.
00:20:44
Speaker
Uh like phyrexia. Yeah, very good. I like it and that'll take us To our final artificial plane bolus's meditation realm and who better to talk about that than our own resident bolus scholar Hobbs well in bolus's meditation realm is kind of interesting in some ways because it was just this mysterious realm that could only be kind of accessed by Dominarian that were really skilled servants
00:21:12
Speaker
Specifically Tetsu Umazawa had kind of practiced for years to try to figure out how to get there He wanted to physically be able to travel to this realm and so he kind of sets this realm up and and Bolas tracked it he like tracked the energy so that he could find a way to kind of get there to You know, he projected his mind to the realm and left his body unprotected, which I think led to some pretty bad stuff I don't really remember that much of that part of the storyline. So if either of you do
00:21:41
Speaker
please jump in because i don't remember but i remember isn't this around the time that we kind of like bull has basically left himself completely unprotected when he was still pre-sparking
00:21:52
Speaker
Yep, that's exactly it. Well, it wasn't pre-sparking, but it was a moment where he leaves his body unguarded because he trusted Tetsuo to be his champion so much that Tetsuo decided to overthrow him and cut his spirit in half, escape the realm, and then crushed his body in the real tangible world as well.
00:22:23
Speaker
Right. And then, and then at this point now, so that's yes. And so now post mending, what we've seen this realm be is kind of, it's like bolus' hideout. It's basically where everybody that he's kind of recruited has come to at some point. So we know that Sarkin visited it kind of following his assignment from bolus at the Ayabugan. And he was kind of debrief there. This is where the pools of becoming are, which we've seen the gems of becoming in one of the cards already. It's kind of the gem that is between bolus' horns.
00:22:52
Speaker
And when he arrives, he basically finds Bolas reconstructing the body of Tezzeret. And we also have Rasca having been visited here where she kind of got this promise of the leadership of the Golgari if she just did this minor little thing where she traveled to Ixalan and kind of located the immortal son. And this is kind of, this is all we really have seen of this realm to date. So we don't really know as much about this one. I mean, I don't even really kind of see, you know, it's like,
00:23:20
Speaker
Who created it? It's a lot more kind of nebulous in terms of it being an artificial plane. And I was wondering if you either of you knew more about it from that perspective because anything that I studied on this was just kind of a.
00:23:34
Speaker
We don't really know how to get there more so than this was created. So yeah, it's a little less of a, I think it's still, in my mind at least, I think of it as an artificial plane, a created plane, but it's a lot less blood and guts and grime and grit than it is like a spiritual realm. It's a place where you go metaphysically more than you do physically.
00:24:03
Speaker
And at this point, we kind of see that this one is at least listed as quote unquote being stable right now. So I think that this is a realm or a plane and especially if it is artificial that we are going to get to find a little bit more about. Well, and we're kind of at a point where we're currently with the core 19 story. We're looking at bullets backstory, which may or may not cover this.
00:24:28
Speaker
But he is a very present part of our current storyline, at least that we saw in Ixalan, and see him show up at the very, very tail end of Dominaria. Well, I mean, the whole point of the Dominarian story, too, was trying to get allies to fight him. So I suspect, I think, that you're going to be right, Hobbes, that in Ravnica, not only will he show up, but that as some part of his story, we're going to find out some more about this place.
Shaping Realities: Game vs. Real-Life Perspectives
00:24:59
Speaker
yep and so that we kind of have a broad range of what these artificial planes are what they how you get to them what they are who exists there and so this kind of ties us into our real world discussion today which is shaping the reality that you want
00:25:17
Speaker
And so, you know, maybe you can lead us into this discussion here, Hobbs, as as our resident psychologist as well. What is what are we talking about when we say defining our own reality or shaping reality in our own minds? Everything kind of we've talked about this a little bit before, but perspectives and everything comes down to our for other each of us can have our own perspectives and our own perception of what is happening. Two of us seen the same situation.
00:25:44
Speaker
actually experiencing very different things because we're bringing everything of who we are to that situation we're bringing our past experiences we're bringing our thoughts that we're having we're bringing our emotional state with us kind of to whatever scenario or situation that we end up in and we're kind of seeing in the storyline we have these powerful beings that are trying to create a
00:26:10
Speaker
they're almost nirvana, they're utopia, but they're trying to create a world that conforms to their worldview of what they want to see. So in some ways, if at least Bolus being in this realm, what we know about it is
00:26:25
Speaker
It is a place of meditation. There's not people there. This is not a place that people just are allowed to be to versus Sarah's was like a giant party. It was meant to be a version of heaven with other angels and like-minded people kind of around in it. And we see that each of the planeswalkers or each of the people that we know of in these realms are trying to create situations that
00:26:52
Speaker
are conducive to how they see themselves. It's very egosyntonic is what we would call it in the sense that it matches their worldview, their alignment. Sarah did not have a balance to this where she was having good and evil. She had what she thought was perfection in there. And I'm wondering kind of what you guys think about this, like from your own experiences with what you've seen in the world and what type of world would you actually create if you could?
00:27:20
Speaker
It's interesting to just dovetail onto what you said before I answer that question. You know, I sort of posited Sarah's realm versus Phyrexia, original Phyrexia, you know, where they're the classic heaven and hell tropes. But also that was what Yawgmoth thought was perfection. You know, he saw humans as frail beings that needed to be
00:27:48
Speaker
artificially perfected.
00:28:05
Speaker
you know perfecting humanity and making existence exactly what he wanted it to be that to him was perfection too and that's fascinating to me that you can have those two very different viewpoints and you see it that tangibly reflected in the construction and composition of those worlds.
00:28:23
Speaker
There was yeah, there was a really chilling scene, I believe in invasion, the first book for the the invasion block, where his dog much general for the first wave of the invasion, Sabo's topic was vivisecting some people. And she was comparing like talking to the metathron, which were a
00:28:47
Speaker
artificial race that Ursa created to try to protect Dominaria. And she had a metathron vivisected next to a human. And comparing and saying, you know, look how frail this human is and look at all these weak points and snap one vertebrae and now they're paralyzed and you know, compared to the metathron and look at this wonderful craftsmanship and trying to I can't remember who she was even talking to, but definitely drawing some parallels between Ursa and Yawgmoth.
00:29:17
Speaker
And it was, yeah, it's really chilling. Yeah, absolutely.
Mindfulness and Environmental Influence
00:29:22
Speaker
And that's, you know, it's interesting to think about this in real world terms is how we shape our environments around us. I even think just about like what you do to decorate your own home. Like, you know, just to bring this even to a lighter note, but like, what is your home around you look like? And, you know, for me, I used to not,
00:29:42
Speaker
care so much about the aesthetics of my home, about my apartment that I used to live in. It was this cramped little studio apartment in downtown Minneapolis. And it always had piles of clothes everywhere. I had piles of magic cards on shelves. I had dishes in the sink. But also a little bit unintentionally, that was a reflection of my mind at the time, where I was going through just a ton of depression and anxiety.
00:30:10
Speaker
where I sort of didn't have a direction. I hadn't figured out that I wanted to go back to school for teaching yet. You know, I just was sort of all over the place myself. And so, you know, a little bit, I think we do affect, even unconsciously, we affect the world around us.
00:30:28
Speaker
To look like our minds and it's a little bit funny to think about like, you know If you're listening to this in a cubicle like look around and see what have you hung up on the walls, you know What is it that you value or that like reflects your mind? I think that's an interesting practice to think about in our own lives Should I be worried that I just look to my left at a giant bolus poster? Well, I mean
00:30:52
Speaker
No Hero, isn't that what you've been telling us? I I'm just going by the perception that other people may have Yeah, but again perspectives. Yeah And to Joe to dovetail what you on what you've been saying too, it's it's a little bit referential back and forth and
00:31:14
Speaker
I found and I wish I could remember where I read this there was someone was talking about like, just clutter costs you like brain space sometimes and like that can contribute to to some feelings of not necessarily anxiety, but that to just some unease and, and I have found that literally, if I'm starting to feel in a funk a little bit,
00:31:40
Speaker
just like, all right, I'm going to clean off my computer desk. I'm going to get rid of these cans. I'm going to organize the stuff that I have piled that I want to keep but don't have a place for it. Maybe I'll just stick the box in the corner. And just doing that sometimes helps bring me into a better mental place. Well, I mean, you almost are bringing up the concept in some ways of mindfulness. So do you guys know anything about mindfulness, just to start off with, I guess?
00:32:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's a lot of it is just the act of consciously living. I mean, that's the I guess the easiest way to boil it down. It's it's thinking about your breathing. It's thinking about the way that you're holding your spine when you sit. It's, you know, thinking about how you're chewing your food, you know, and some of those are just examples of ways that you can be mindful. But it's, it's that act of consciously doing actions rather than just reacting rather than just doing.
00:32:38
Speaker
Yeah, so you know you bring up the example of say brushing your teeth or eating which is just something that we almost do automatically and when you do that you actually are not aware of all the sensations and everything that's going on in your body and you can use sometimes these tools to be mindful is like you said it's a purposeful action and
00:33:01
Speaker
It actually is supposed to be a very non-judgmental action, too. So when you're eating something mindfully, you are paying attention to how the sensation is of it, like a piece of chocolate. What does it feel like on your tongue? It's not about just doing it quickly. It's not about just swallowing. It's all the actions to go into. But it's also about not really, it's a non-judgmental approach. And you see this a lot when it comes to things like,
00:33:30
Speaker
deep breathing. So like the act of breathing, the purpose of it when you're doing it from a mindful perspective, you're not supposed to count your breath. You're really not supposed to change or alter it. It's not about, it's just about noticing. And it's about kind of being. And in some ways, Alex, what you're describing, changing your environment can be an act of mindfulness to just be aware of what your environment is looking like around you at that time.
00:33:59
Speaker
to make a conscious decision that I'm going to wash the dishes, I'm going to clean up. And the idea being that, you know, from a cognitive perspective, we always talk about everything that's happening is happening. You know, we can make changes in our thinking, our emotions, our behavior. We can also make changes in our environment. And we're kind of seeing with these artificial planes, people are trying to take that piece of what I would call the cognitive theory when we're trying to change
00:34:31
Speaker
Our mood or we're trying to change it and we're doing it by just changing the environment around us That's a
Applying Chaos Theory and Networking in Life
00:34:37
Speaker
great thought. It's it's almost too I Spaced on if you said this in in what you just said hubs, but it's almost like the idea of manifesting something I don't necessarily believe in the
00:34:51
Speaker
actual practice of manifesting where you think about something and then it happens you know like I I want to make more money and then it happens you manifest money but I you can do I think you can do that it's it's kind of that step out from mindfulness you can think about how can I be more productive
00:35:15
Speaker
in my work and then maybe I'll get a promotion or how can I get through more articles to write and therefore I will earn more money or how can I structure my day more efficiently and therefore have a better work-life balance and all that sort of stuff. That sort of manifesting, just putting your mind on it, it's the old phrase of put your mind to it.
00:35:41
Speaker
and you know or for us baseball fans Yogi Bear is the game is 99% mental in the other half physical. So I recently just got back actually from a conference and it was a conference on vocation. It was a conference on career development. It had an emphasis on everything from you know older people trying to return to work
00:36:03
Speaker
to students, high school, it was all the different kind of areas, right? Anything that could be a career development is what this conference was about. The best talk that I saw during this conference was on how do we apply chaos theory to making goals and to setting goals when it comes to something like vocation. Because the problem is we treat most things in life as if they are linear. You know, we treat them as if they're a linear thing that is gonna happen, okay?
00:36:31
Speaker
And what we know is that most things aren't linear. In fact, most things, yeah, those things are definitely not linear. And so how do we take advantage of that? And chaos theory kind of tells us that part of what we should do
00:36:46
Speaker
is simply we should take advantage of those situations. So like you said, Joe, if I think that I want to have money, I'm not going to just have money the next day. But I can try to take advantage of situations where I might get lucky. So maybe I do attend a meeting where I know that I might have a chance encounter with somebody to network. So you know, the idea being that a lot of what happens in business
00:37:13
Speaker
Does happen from chance encounters you hear a lot about networking networking is a huge deal. So Well, even though you can't predict which conversation may lead to the outcome that you want You can put yourself in the situation to just have lots of conversations. I
00:37:31
Speaker
At the top of this, before we ever started, Alex and I were talking a little bit about statistical probability and this idea that people don't really understand stats. That's why people struggle with this concept of luck, actually. I would say this applies a lot to magic when the Shuffler screwed me, this very unlikely thing happened.
00:37:55
Speaker
Statistics are simply not gonna say that unlikely things don't happen. They're just unlikely to happen so they don't happen as frequently. But if you have enough events, it's going to happen at some point. And I think that that is kind of what this chaos theory is playing off of is you just put yourself in the situation where you can try to have that event happen while you're there. And that is what these artificial planes in some ways are. They're trying to create situations that'll best mimic what they want to have happen.
00:38:25
Speaker
I think to sort of pulling this even more into what the mind space of these creators was when we get there. What the mind space of these creators was when they made the planes. Karn, for instance, I think about this a lot.
00:38:46
Speaker
created Mirrodin to be this perfect plane not perfect in the terms of Sarah's realm because he's been there I mean he'd seen what had happened he tended the engines of the weather light he knows Sarah's realm and that story not perfect in the terms of Phyrexia because he also knows about Phyrexia but perfect
00:39:06
Speaker
just as in balanced he actually was trying to eliminate mathematical chance and just balance everything he wanted it to be completely like cause and effect but you know structured and you know i think part of that is he had had this lifetime of seeing
00:39:27
Speaker
Uh, humanity and organic and natural things just, you know, corrupt for one way or another. Maybe it was greed. Maybe it was lust. Maybe it was power. Maybe it was just simple chaos. But he tries to build this artificial world where none of that will happen. And yet it still happens. And that's, that's fascinatingly tragic to me.
00:39:52
Speaker
He's trying to create, what is it, like a sound box? That's kind of how I think of it. That's just a little device that has this mathematical thing that goes through its whole programming, and that's what it is. And unfortunately, something that large and intricate doesn't take a whole lot to just shift it a little bit to one side, and all of a sudden, everything is thrown off. Well, it's the gathering momentum. At some point, it's unstoppable.
00:40:20
Speaker
Right, and that's that whole element of chaos theory, the chances start getting larger and larger and larger as you follow one of those statistical probabilities. I think too, I think a lot about the influence that being a former, I mean being the creation of Urza, being his servant in a way, his test subject basically, and then now essentially being part Urza, you know, he's his planeswalker heir in a way,
00:40:50
Speaker
I think a lot of what Karn does is trying to right the wrongs of. Weirdly, the person that I would call his father, it's sort of the sins of the father visited on the sun here. And I think that is a lot of why he created mirrored in the way he did. Urza so staunchly defended Dominaria, but Dominaria was flawed. It was always going to be flawed. And I wonder, too, if some of it was he was part of that, like the invasion is just
00:41:20
Speaker
Like a horrific event and to go back to maybe trauma a little bit. And the invasion was just a capstone on this whole thing. Like Karn and Erza had been battling the Phyrexians in various different ways for a very long time. And I wonder if once the invasion was done, he's like, okay, the threat is over.
00:41:40
Speaker
Yawgmoth is dead. Phyrexia is neutralized. I need quiet. I need peace. I need catharsis. I'm going to go build this plane of just perfection with no living thing, no unpredictability, and it's going to just
00:41:55
Speaker
run through its paces, this world of mathematics, you know, perfect mathematics. Right. It's almost this kid who has a really tough time at school, you know, doesn't have friends or just is having a tough time in classes or something. But he goes home and he logs onto Minecraft. It's kind of an escapism. I mean, like, that's what a lot of hobbies are. I mean, and like, especially hobbies of fantasy can do that. But a lot of things, it gives you a place to go that is different than the place you are at and different than the place you have been.
00:42:26
Speaker
And that, I think, fits for a lot of these worlds. Well, I think unless you guys have anything else to put in on this, you know, or any last notes, I think that's a really good place to stop. Maybe we just, you know, end it with this sort of, you know,
00:42:45
Speaker
not plea, but this request to all of you listening, and to each of us individually, this sort of charge to be mindful about creating the world around you that you want. It's the whole golden rule, treat others the way you want to be treated. It's not just your physical space, it's your personality, it's your interactions with people. But if you give out kindness, love, warmth, care,
00:43:13
Speaker
People will see that and more often than not, they will reflect it. You know, that that whole effect on the world around you, if you want that, you know, create your plane, create your reality around you, do things to affect it. You have that power. I will even say just as an experiment that you can try this week and it's
00:43:36
Speaker
It, trust me, it's something that's really, really simple. Um, I used to work with a pharmacy student that was, um, joining in on some of our groups in psychology and was learning kind of about a lot of the theories and how things kind of worked. And he had said that, you know, people are generally in their day to day life are, are, are they're going to and from places. And we work in a medical center that is very large. And he would notice that even here in the Midwest, people had their head down and were just on their way.
00:44:03
Speaker
So he just started smiling at people when he passed them in the hallway. And I don't really want to talk about what happened. I mean, I'm sure people are kind of thinking, but I really would encourage you to try this in your own life is to go out there and to see what happens if you do something as simple as smile at
Hosts' Personal Touches to Artificial Planes
00:44:25
Speaker
somebody.
00:44:25
Speaker
Let's do one quick whip around here, bringing it back to sort of a lighthearted, a goofy note. What is one thing, if you were on your own artificial plane, what's one thing that you would make sure to put on there for yourself? Let's start with you, Alex.
00:44:40
Speaker
So I think there's a lot of good answers for this, but I'm pretty sure there's only one right answer. And that answer is to make sure that I have some doggos on my plane. Because I've got to have some puppers to go with the memory phone. Good choice. Hobbs. We let Alex go first? Jeez. I mean, because I think we all know that I was probably going to just start off here with doggos, too. So you know.
00:45:10
Speaker
You can totally, like I said, there's only one right answer. You can also be right. I'm willing to share that with you, Hobbs. Well, you know what? So I've determined that instead of us doing this, instead of us me choosing just the same answer, I'm going to just even go more lighthearted and say that I am going to have homunculi. Because they're kind of the doggos of magic.
00:45:34
Speaker
They really are. That's a good choice. They are good boys.
Closing Remarks and Social Media Handles
00:45:38
Speaker
And as for me, I can't get away from it. I do have to say the other right answer and really the best right answer, which is Cats. Cats for Commanders. Oh, God. This is a Cats podcast.
00:45:54
Speaker
It's not that I have anything against cats, but I mean, they just aren't dogs. I'm not sure if it's because they're not trying hard enough, or if there's just something else going on. I'm trying not to hold it against them. Well, to be fair, dogs and magic aren't dogs either. They're hounds. And that is a whole other thing. And that's a whole other podcast. That's our show.
00:46:22
Speaker
Thanks for listening. You can find Joe Redman on Twitter at FinDhorn. You can find HobbsQ on Twitter at HobbsQ. And you can find Alex on Twitter at Alexander New M. You can find the podcast at Goblin Lore Pod. And you can email us any questions, comments, or concerns at goblinlorepodcast at gmail.com. Thank you all for listening. And remember, goblins like snowflakes are only dangerous in numbers.