McAfee was a perfectly competent programmer in the 80s and 90s. I think by the time most people heard of him he had already fried the part of his brain responsible for programming with copious amounts of every drug.

I’d still take him over Musk any day.

You’ve gotta take the first step yourself, no one can do that for you.

Or don’t. Be a shutin. Fear the mailman. Die a virgin. I’m not your boss.

Don’t get me wrong I’m no stranger to our lord and savior Fargoth, bosmer bussy, or Nords and their secret wives. The Elder Scrolls is fantastic because you can simultaneously take it so seriously and … do whatever it is we lore nerds get up to.

CHIM isn’t really meta like that. It is a state of enlightenment achieved after coming to terms with the fact that the Elder Scrolls setting exists within the ‘dream’ of a godhead. The godhead is a mysterious and high order entity, think Lovecraftian gods, which isn’t really sleeping and dreaming in the way we normally think of it.

Typically when one comes to understand the nature of the dream they inhabit, they vanish, becoming one with the dream in a process known as zero-summing. It essentially means coming to the conclusion that all things within the dream are one and the same, that the individual is an illusion.

CHIM is achieved by facing this fate and asserting that, though all reality is a dream, your existence as an individual with thoughts and feelings and agency within the dream matters and is valid. Some suggest this state confers great power, such as the ability to reshape the landscape or perform miracles, like when one lucid dreams. However, I find this position poorly supported. Rather, CHIM seems best viewed as one form of enlightenment, a state achieved through great wisdom and insight but which brings with it no particular power. Vivec can be slain, after all, and relies on his connection to the Heart of Lorkhan to exercise divine power.