If anybody reading this actually is fighting for the living, I’m in. I know I can be useful. Just not controlled. Somebody has to be willing to work with that.
I almost tried to find the HQ for Charlie Hebdo, but considering I’m red flagged as an islamic terrorist, I figured I wouldn’t get past security. It was a longshot not worth attempting to navigate Paris for. I get lost on a Cartesian plane; I’m helpless in European cities. The Hebbers might’ve tolerated me.
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Art Numbers:
DEC BIN HEX ART
1 1 1 1
2 10 2 2
3 11 3 21
4 100 4 3
5 101 5 31
6 110 6 32
7 111 7 321
8 1000 8 4
9 1001 9 41
10 1010 1A 42
11 1011 1B 421
12 1100 1C 43
13 1101 1D 431
14 1110 1E 432
15 1111 1F 4321
16 10000 10 5
If they had any use, the computer people would be using them. Most of my good ideas are frivolous, but sometimes I get a humdinger. I’m worth keeping around even if you have to dequirm me. I’d rather be allowed to have people.
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some SoC:
Ambien really might have caused roseanne to type something out of character. She was an actor, dreaming. I know she was gay friendly way before that was cool. [actress? Are we still gendering that word? This shit is frustrating. Is Esperanto gendered? It might be easier to learn a new lingua franca and let everybody gender whatever they want among their in-group.]
people probably smarter than people think? Bronn...anybody who writes their own book, like Steve Martin or Carrie Fisher. Jimmy Buffet, although I never liked cocaine music. Dumb people need a ghost writer, like marilyn manson. His book was pretty cool, he gave great interview in Bowling for Columbine, but surprise! The performer who couldn't make music turned out to be a creep. I never liked the michael jacksons and marilyn mansons of the world because their music was crap. If I want to watch dancing, I'll watch dancing. To music made by somebody who knows how. Billy Joel. He get #metooed? I bet not...nope! No controversies at all. The man's a professional. My dumb ear could tell that through his music. Joss Wheedon didn't suprise me at all. The black warrior woman trope was obnoxious long before Firefly. It's funny--the weird kid next door to me kept trying to get me to watch Buffy. Same kid had a poster of Rheaume the goalie. Buffy the show probably was smarter than I was giving credit, but even Firefly is deliberately dumbed down for teevee. Like, badly. It's just decent theater is all. I bet anybody who wrote a bestselling play could do at least as well, and theater seems to have dropped off once somebody got the whole video thing flowing. Television was always a bowdlerized wasteland whether it was five channels of dreck or a hundred of even cheaplier made dreck. Firefly being top of that pile...anybody know the expression, "damning with faint praise"? Like, "Truly the greatest movie adaptation of a video game ever made!"
Not that I haven't found great stuff through games. The soundtrack to Fallout3 is top flight. Now /there's/ an example of the kind of talent you had to display to get a voice in the olde days. Like the early rappers--they didn't have to mumble. Kinda the oppo. The GTA series I assume is still something special. Rockstar at least used to be full of people who understand the medium is the message, and theirs is the opposite of "call of duty". I mean...just the titles! But Big Order has definitely gone way too fucking far. I bet Big Order has moles at every level of that game company. Hell, I bet there's a power sharing arrangement by now. It's Order itself that's the problem any more, and Order is already managing it's own dissipation. pTerry explained it--the good people are good at toppling the tyrant, but what then? The trash starts piling up and a new tyrant takes over. Good people suck at planning. I'm glad I never tried to be good. Fucking jeebus.
Virtue is a luxury of a full belly*, and requires the wisdom of a grown-up to exercise correctly. Kids are born savage fucking animals, but not evil. Telling them they are and then demanding they chase "good", however you want to describe it, is cogging to create monsters. Hey--this is worth leaving a record of: When is the proper age, developmentally, for a child to make peace with death? I mean, not as some playground in the sky, but when do you think a child is old enough to accept the concept of "I end”? 'Cuz I can tell you. Same age you learn about death. I think it's 5 or 6. Before I left memories that stuck, but I was told my family thought I didn't understand my grandfather's death. I know I did. I understood he ended. Now he's meat. I end. Everything ends. It makes perfect fucking sense at that age, and doesn't carry much weight at all 'cuz I hadn't been denying it however many years already. Lying to your kid and telling them everything's going to be fine in order to artificially prolong their childhood is fucking child abuse. You end up with weakminded, gullible adults always looking for the next leader to tell them what to think. Let your kids grow up already. It's a lot easier than keeping them in some kind of stupid bubble. Storks.
*So is a life of the mind. Both are a good example of how luxuries can become necessities. I challenge everyone to do without entertainment. This includes your holy book. Eliminate all distractions. I mean...it's doable. You can go live in a monastery somewhere and crawl up your own asshole. But I bet you can't function in the modern world without any distraction; any zoned-out blankness while the flickering screen washes over you. Now: Why do you think the old networks called it "programming"?
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The reason the librarians flipped out when bush2 siphoned up the data about everyone's reading habits isn't because he wanted to know, like, who was writing pro-trump books and anti-trump books. Trump thinks like that, but he's a retart. It's a lot more useful to know who can tell the difference between Stephen King and Dean Koontz.
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Look at old portraits from the early days of photography. None of those people were happy to be in front of a camera. It’s not like they were cargo cult savages who thought the machine stole a piece of their soul. They instinctively understood that a photograph is an assault, one worth enduring but not celebrating.
Imagine trying to explain tiktok to them.
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I wonder if Greta realized she's part of the problem yet...
...Her role is the same as Al Sharpton, or Jesse Jackson before him. She's to keep the angry young 'uns who'd rather not die horribly in middle age failing to work within the system rather than tearing it down to replace with something that actually works for the benefit of the peasants. As a side effect of a society built as a broad diamond rather than a pyramid, the peasants would preserve the biosphere. Only the antoinettes of the species see no difference between bread and burnt splatter. [go read that link. It’s amazing how wrong even the best attempt can be. The falsity behind that statement, that I knew, was that “cake” wasn’t birthday cake with icing, it was the leftover junk the slaves cleaned out of the ovens. The truth may be out there, but the lies are in your head.]
So I keep forgetting how actually young that kid is. The world moves so fast these days it feels like a lifetime since she impressed me by walking out of her forced schooling because she thought something else was more important. I bet she's not even 25 yet. The fact that she hasn't yet seen her place in the power structure still makes me suspicious. Is she the best her generation can produce? Is she today's Bobby Dylan? If so, I really see that as more validation that the west has decomposed all the leaders so long that slightly above average is enough to garner a global following.
But she's probably still a kid. Or coopted. Or evil in the first place. Or a totally nonexistent fabrication of Big Order. What the fuck do I know? I sit alone in a room.
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Speaking of kids with their heart in the right place.
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youtube actually proffered something worthwhile.
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best love song ever. He was the brains behind Genesis. Like me, saddled with more brains than are helpful.
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My suggestion how to handle this ethically—save these protopeople as information. If you create something in a lab that could be a human, and we care that it now never will be, store the unique set of instructions. That lump of cells doesn’t have a personhood yet, and it doesn’t necessarily need one this very moment. If the situation for the species improves, we could use the old protopeople as the first set of engineered instructions. Seeds for the colony ship or something.
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Well, my first batch of books came today. That’s how I was intending to stifle myself rather than keep adding to this. I’m kind of a minimalist; I think this was enough voice. Anyway, I’m really tired of all my packages coming crudely pre-opened. This one went out for delivery yesterday, went missing for a day, and came with the aperture barely stuck together. I’m 99.9% sure it’s just to make me act crazy, but I’ll play along. I’ll stop trusting dead tree books. Keee-rist my life is going to be boring—I have to learn to live without possessions as well as people. I really wish Big Order didn’t have to be so inflexible. Why do only the shittiest people get to participate in society? I now have a policy of never trusting anyone society likes. My woman kept trying to kill me and my father loves her and society loves both of them.
Let’s see, axioms in my life:
Anybody raised religious is my mortal enemy. Like “The Matrix” explained, anybody living by faith is a gullible idiot and easily manipulated by the agents of Big Order.
Anybody who has a god to forgive them has no functional morals. You know how to tell when a religious person is lying? Their lips are moving. It’s why the xtians forced the change in Rick’s character at the start of S2. Nobody is allowed to model a person who isn’t a hypocrite, not even in a silly cartoon. It might make the jeebus slaves feel bad, and religious people freak out and kill everything if you make them feel bad.
People are monsters in inverse proportion to their power in society. Not each individual’s heart split; I find the highest percentage of better-than-stone-evil people the lower I trawl in any society. There’s something about being hated like that that’s a pressure cooker. Like the way persecuted minorities who rise above through artistry tend to really excel, the downtrodden make the most effort to be fucking decent people. The happiest I ever was, socially, was in that homeless shelter in Paarl. I woulda gone back there but for the atm eating my card.
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Let’s see how well my overall understanding of the big picture applies here. I’ll bet the best thing to do, from both a military and fiscal perspective, is start from scratch and redesign the littoral ship. Put someone other than a con artist at the helm of the project. If the navy itself is still relevant in the age of weaponized space, the littorals really sound like a great idea with corrupt execution attempted before we had the tech. Raygun wrote that playbook with the star wars boondoggle.
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I’ve always said it’s incumbent on everyone to reduce the cycle of dysfunction with every generation. “I’m goan beat the shit outta mah kids. My daddy beat me and it didn’t do me no harm.” —yes it did, asshole. You are hitting children. Knock it off. Now I’d add to that advice/admonishment: keep it secret that you do. Tell your children to lie and say you beat and rape them so the rest of the xtians will think they’re normal. You don’t want to be not normal in a protestant society. Ouch.
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A trick to fight the manipulation; how to defeat an agent, in Matrix-speak: Do all your thinking that matters in language. Don’t ever trust any instincts. Slow your language as much as possible. Structure your thinking so that you can properly place your prepositions.
And always, always be aware of what you don’t know. That’s where they insert the knife. Comedians use the knife to tickle. Teachers point out the weak spot.