Goodbye friends page, hello friends!

In all likelihood I will never look at http://orawnzva.livejournal.com/friends again.

DON'T PANIC, it's not because I don't love you! It's because I've lately discovered that my RSS reader, Vienna, being browser-based, authenticates to livejournal.com using a magic cookie just like any other web-browser, and thus I can pull down all the LJ that's fit for me to read as RSS. This completely obsoletes my previous system for keeping track of which LJ posts I have and have not read.

As part of the migration process, I have made some minor adjustments to the set of journals I read and to my friends list (note that there is now no essential link between these two sets). I make very few locked entries, and the main consideration when adjusting which information pipes I'm subscribed to is my time and sanity, so, as far as I'm concerned, these adjustments are of relatively small social weight. However, if it is for whatever reason important to you whether or not (a) I keep track of what's going on with you or (b) you have access to my occasional more personal musings, I will gladly take that into consideration.

note: I've been using a DefaultView custom friends group to filter my friends page, and I will, at least for the time being, continue to keep it synchronized with the set of livejournals I am actually reading, so you can check whether or not I am reading your journal by looking for your own entries on my friends page.

Ars Magica Liberalis

I have an idea for an RPG setting, which is clear enough in my mind and based on material which is well-enough known that I might actually think of producing a sourcebook for it, especially if I get some help.

The short version is this: what if academics was magic?

The roots of this idea go back a long way. As philosopher Ken Wilber and my friends in the Sisterhood of the Owl reminded me last spring, Western civilization once had a Wisdom tradition of its own, comparable to those of the East — a tradition of contemplative, mystical insight, passed from teacher to student.

The same ancients had a clear notion of a good education, and when the traditions of scholarship in the West were restored — in the form of a clerical (if firmly exoteric) order of which most of you are members! — so was that notion. And, as the aptly-named quadrivium points out, the ancients believed that such knowledge was power in a sense that we might well call magical. Similar connections obtain between my chosen field of study and that other ancient tradition (clerical, scholarly, and mystical) in which I have a portion.

Concretely, this is the same old geek trope about an RPG of college life, with character classes for majors, and so forth, only writ large and taken seriously. I have a handful of particular ideas. (A few of these are based loosely on unpublished proprietary content and will have to be vetted and redacted before they can be publicly discussed.) The basic concept could be embedded in any of a number of RPG systems, Ars Magica being the most obvious, if only because of the appropriateness of the name. Mage: The Awakening, which I've seen described as "Ars Magica modern", could also work, with some modifications.

So, first, has this been done? I don't count Ars Magica itself because, as far as I know, it's a setting in which the Western esoteric tradition is real magic, whereas I'm talking about a setting where exoteric knowledge is real magic. And, second, anyone want to help me brainstorm this? I'm particularly hoping to hear from quadrivium, mnemex, and gaudior and friends, but anyone who wants to is welcome to contribute.