Riverdance

Awesome! Exactly my kind of show: Spectacle, music, humans doing impossible coordinated stuff, and a quiet audience.

I’d never seen step-dancing live before. Video doesn’t do it justice.

The set was great. I had no idea that The Monument had that nice of a projection/video system. It looked great. There were some small bandstand things in front and the video tended to have borders (cave ceiling, valley edge, etc…) so it didn’t look like a screen.

The musicians were good. There were several instruments that I did not know existed – and therefore cannot list here because I don’t know their names. I’m not qualified to judge how talented they were. They sounded great to me, but I think anyone who can keep tempo and hit the right notes sounds great.

The dancers were so far out on the bell curve that, statistically, they don’t exist. Insane tempo – I’d call them 1/32nd notes – tapping on-fucking-pointe.

I love it when there are frame-rate glitches in live performances (e.g. wheels appearing to spin backward because the rotation speed and the frame-rate are isosynchronous). There were several of those moments when their feet were moving so quickly that brain-rate was simply too slow.

We’re close to a post-scarcity civilization. Certainly not for everyone, but we’re getting there. The fact that 1 in 10,000,000 humans can do that sort of thing is nothing new. Think about what needs to happen to get a troupe of them to Rapid City, SD (pop 85,000). It’s not how many are really good that’s surprising. It’s how many have to be able to even attempt it in order for a winnowing process to sort out the really good ones.

Profession sports is a similar example. The fact that 1 in 10,000,000 humans is really good at throwing a ball is nothing new. A system that feeds 10,000,000 people through a winnowing system of middle school, high school, college, then pro is new, because those 10,000,000 people have the spare time and money to even try instead of poking seeds into the ground with a stick.

And, of course, I thought about my book. The Arts are often (nearly always) left out of RPG (lit or otherwise). There could be some amazing stuff. Riverdance and Circe de Solei are already amazing. Add superpowers. Then the werewolf baseball scene from Twilight popped into my head. I liked it, but that’s not the point. The point is arena size. It’s hard to put on a show when the audience is too far away to see anything or the athletes are moving too fast for normal people to see. I’ll think about it and come up with something. Something like these guys, maybe:

My world is going to go post-scarcity pretty quickly. The first winter (book two) is going to be rough because most everyone is still mostly normal (going up-grade reduces need for food and sleep) and mostly ignorant (can’t use magic as a productivity tool until you know how it works). As those two barriers fall, productivity will skyrocket leading to excess capacity for things such as dedicated artists.