#why is low-effort shitposting so high effort

[couch-collector]

[seannessy]

⚠️POLITICS⚠️

haha bet you forgot through the shitposts that i have a bachelor's degree in political science

here's a bunch of reasons why Kamala Harris is going to win the presidency because i can never find the effort to edit this into a video:👇

1. The current polls are VERY biased towards republicans. Most large polls just take the averages of other smaller polls, and right now the GOP has been dumping LOTS OF MONEY into publishing a lot of fluff polls in swing states to make themselves look better and to get more donations. Democrats don't usually publish their polls publicly. Odds are it's another red mirage.

2. The majority of people who Trump is catering to just don't vote. A lot of the latest pushes in the Aiden Ross Gamerbro communities are not reliable voters, even as loud as they are online. You cannot convince me that the twitter edgelord crowd has ever even seen a ballot in their lives.

3. In elections canvassing matters by about 300% more than advertising (my own ballpark estimate, not a specific datapoint, but still very true having worked in both canvassing and campaign marketing). The only people signing up to canvass for Trump are just stealing Elon's money, meanwhile people are flying out from all 50 states to swing states to canvass for Kamala.

4. "This is Hillary Clinton all over again." No it isn't. Hundreds of papers have been published that all agree that the reason Hillary lost (besides the Michigan debacle) was that largely a lot of people already assumed she was going to win, and so they didn't go out to vote. Sean Westwood did a really good paper on this in 2018, the more likely you are expected to win, the less of your supporters turn out. The entire narrative is that Kamala is either tied or behind, so anyone who supports her will NOT be sitting this one out.

5. Kamala just did a MASSIVE rally event in Texas. Texas. In this part of the campaign, any sane strategist would tell you to do ALL campaigning in the swing states, so this makes no sense... unless internal democrat polls are saying that Texas is now winnable for democrats. I will remind you that Texas is not NEARLY as red as the stereotype says, and Greg Abbot has himself previously said that Texas would have gone blue if not for all of the voter suppression he did. I'm not joking. This is real. The only reason Texas is still Lean Red instead of Moderate Blue is because of insane levels of voter suppression by Texas GOP.

6. When turnout is low, republicans win. When turnout is high, democrats win. Turnout is already STUPIDLY high in the early voting metrics. Even higher than 2020 (which i will remind you, we won) in some cases.

7. Voter demographics just aren't on Trump's side here. Lots of republicans have bled out of Trumpism, and in a close enough race as this one looks to be even a few thousand republicans deciding to stay home could make or break it in a lot of states. Additionally, while Trump has made a lot of progress in minority voters (daily reminder that the median voter is stupid enough for "median voter" to be used as a slur in political science communities), Kamala has the white woman vote locked down. And oh no! Look at that! Which voter demographic is orders of magnitudes both larger and more active voters than all of the minority demographics that Trump has been gaining in? Yep! Kamala's lead in the white woman demographic has entirely erased Trump's gains in other communities. Abortion was the final nail in the coffin of republican chances, they took the mask off too early. The dog caught the car and didn't know what to do with it.

8. Voter demographics are STILL not on Trump's side even ignoring all that other stuff, because keep in mind, Trump voters have largely been older people, and the waves of people who elected him previously have... well they've kind of died. Covid really didn't help with that. I mean obviously not everyone, but like, this is a close race, and a very large chunk of those voters have been reincarnated as plants or whatever now.

9. "The X Factor" is 100% on Kamala's side. By that I mean just the force of raw charisma, the Kamala campaign is just more appealing and less unnerving to the general population. I really hate to keep hammering this but oh my god dude have you SEEN JD Vance????? Even after the debate where he performed as best as he possibly could and Walz performed as bad as he possibly could, samples STILL said they supported Walz over Vance by a factor of 85 PERCENT.

10. "The Shy Trump Effect." There's a myth a lot of people believe that Trump underperforms in polls and overperforms in elections because voters are shy to admit they're fans of him. A few things. #1: This was disproved so many times, including in Sean Westwood's previously mentioned paper. #2: Even after it's disproved, many polls already factor it into their calculations, which is actually INFLATING his odds in the polls. #3: Anyone who would have been a Shy Trump Supporter either just isn't going to vote this election cycle or is going to follow the Cheney's lead and vote for Kamala instead. This is probably the one election in our entire lives where Democrats have appealed to the right and it actually fucking worked.

11. Polymarket. A lot of people point to the new Polymarket as evidence that Trump has a lot of support among the average joe crowd. These people have no idea how the Polymarket works. American citizens legally can't bet in it, and the only way to get around that is by using Crypto. How many tech illiterate boomers do you think are going to know how to use both Crypto and a VPN? All of Trump's support there is coming from techbro whales or people in other countries. Infact, I think the number was that about a whopping 30% of all bets made on the side of Trump were sourced back to this one French Billionaire.

That being said, it's not a predetermined victory. Currently I'd put the odds at anywhere between 60-40 and 70-30 in favor of Kamala, but that still leaves Trump plenty of room.

The moral of the story is that things aren't hopeless! We have a very good shot at winning--as long as we all keep pushing like hell!

Oh also, if they try another Jan 6th, reminder that Biden is now the one in control of the military and national guard at the capital. Lol, Lmao, even.

[tsui-no-sora]

Do you ever make a post so good you're like 'this would do numbers on tumblr dot com' and then it gets like 18 notes. 23 likes. 3 likes 1 reblog. Like sir I put effort and love and my expectations to that post why is it not doing good. Then I make a shitpost and boom 700 notes instantly like wtf. People dont like my great posts they like shitposts. But then I also see someone make a post get similar to mine and their post does numbers and I'm sad.

And when I say this it feels like I want attention but no I actually care about a post and nothing happens to it I want things to happen this is very stupid I I just wanted to rant before I went to sleep

This has been sitting in my inbox so long I'm sorryyy but yeah I totally get that feeling more so back when I used to actually try to post analysis and meta and stuff

It's just an universal truth that whatever low effort thing you make will get a ton of more attention than whatever high effort thing you make it happens with literally everything

But don't beat yourself up too much for it while the obvious line here is you post for yourself first and foremost and whatever else but I think it's really normal to want attention and expect it I get that feeling a lot even if you can't control that there's no need to call yourself stupid for feeling it

[fuckepilepsy]

EPILEPTICON 2021 ANNOUNCEMENT POST

@the-twitchy-life has been pretty diligent about making noise for EpileptiCon, but I have not. I've very tired, ya'll.* So I'm going to repost my yearly write-up, but first, here is a link to her official announcement post. It's much more concise and straightforward, and I will reblog it again after posting this.

What is EpileptiCon?

EpileptiCon is sort of festival or convention for people who have seizure disorders, right here on Tumblr. This year EpileptiCon will run from November 1st through November 8th!

Anybody who has a seizure disorder is invited to participate. That includes epileptics and non-epileptics alike. If you have pseudoseizures, psychogenic seizures, PNES, NEAD, FND, etc., you are absolutely a part of EpileptiCon if you want to be!

Here’s the concept: for a week, we generate a burst of activity in a community that is typically quiet and gloomy, flooding the tags and each other’s dashboards with epilepsy/seizure disorder content, talking about ourselves, our experiences, and our interests as people who live with a seizure disorder.

Okay, but why?

You might have noted that EpileptiCon coincides with Epilepsy Awareness Month. This is by design. @the-twitchy-life and I conceived of the idea of EpileptiCon as an alternative to attempting to raise awareness, because we believe that Epilepsy Awareness Month should be for people who have epilepsy.

Epilepsy Awareness Month isn’t even really about people who have epilepsy, at least not directly; it’s about epilepsy itself.  Epilepsy Awareness Month isn’t for us, either. It is for people who do not have it, because the whole point is to improve public awareness and understanding of epilepsy. Those of us who are living with epilepsy are already quite aware of it and have no need of an awareness campaign.

Furthermore, it’s generally on us to scrounge up the spoons to do the work, and as you all know, spoons are always in short supply. I believe that energy would be better spent reaching out to each other, so that we might enjoy a sense of fellowship and belonging pertaining to something that normally brings isolation and despair. 

EpileptiCon was conceived because we need to take time to celebrate ourselves and each other for our ongoing efforts to survive and persevere in the face of adversity. So we feel less alone, so we feel more comfortable and safe talking about it, get some things off of our chest and maybe achieve a little catharsis.

How do I participate?

Make epilepsy-themed posts and tag them with “EpileptiCon2021.“ They don’t have to be high-quality or time-consuming. In fact, I encourage you to indulge in completely low-effort shitposting, because spending a bunch of energy writing a post on how epilepsy is terrible is a good way to get burned out. The goal is quantity, and whatever fun you can wring out of it.

If you want to do a big write-up about an epilepsy-related thing that is important to you, go for it! Just remember that you are absolutely free to pour low-effort epilepsy shitposts into the tag for everyone to see. It’s also absolutely cool to repost your old stuff, though you should remember that reblogging it instead of doing a copy-paste into a fresh post won’t drop it into the tag for public viewing.

For those of you who are flagged NSFW and can’t post into tags, just tag my url so I can see your posts. In fact, it may be a good idea to do that regardless just to make sure. In the past, I have discovered EpileptiCon posts that escaped notice MONTHS afterward.

I’ll watch the #epilepticon2021 tag in addition to all the others (#epilepsy, #epileptic, #seizures, etc.) and reblog everything that comes through it. If you’re not comfortable with epilepsy stuff on your blog, feel free to submit to @the-twitchy-life or myself. We’ll get you the spotlight you deserve.

*So tired, in fact, that I felt compelled to use the word "ya'll" despite never actually using anywhere in real life.

@jaskkin

[steamedtangerine]

Okay......

so I tend to get a tad weary when I notice a sudden upswing of random back posts I made get a huge insane surge of traffic to them.

In the last 12 hours, two separate posts attracted a high-volume of one-dimensional accounts-each trying to represent two radically and epitomized polarized lifestyles....many of these accounts had all the earmarks of being contrived, empty blogs or fake limited nonsense....many of them with long word salads or number sequences set into the name.

Sure enough, in a flurry of one-dimensional porn blogs, was one account (with numbers peppered in the name) that I investigated, and it didn’t take long for me to stumble across the most insane crap ever. It was a post they reblogged from a BS account going by “rwood2477″ (the confrontational tone in the header “I post what I want- no apologies” was a big giveaway if the numbers in the name wasn’t enough along with the boomer memes and generic cat content).

It claimed to be a “personal account” from a “trooper” who was assigned to handle the Capitol “protest”. This account was supposedly found in “The Newport News” (no link or source provided....by the way, Newport News is the name of a city not a news outlet) It was the most god-awful FOP puff piece ever scrawled. Such saccharine-saturated, jingoist-laden, leftist-/media-demonizing, vain babbling dipshittery! It tried to paint Trump supporters as showing up peacefully (with no clubs, zip-ties, bombs, guns, confederate flags, white supremacy regalia, no military regalia) and made sure to emphasize that the attendees were a thorough mix (HA!!) of whites, blacks, and Latinos, and that they were incredibly cordial and respectful to our police and left quietly. They used flowery terms about how it all “made their heart swell with pride” or how their “eyes filled with tears at the outpouring of support”. -and how the real villains were the BLM people who showed up (some in devil’s costumes?!) to cause mayhem.

Every bit of it dripped with lies. Like we are all to ignore all the massive imagery given to us from photos, extensive video coverage, and actual live reporting of the smoke, fires, rampaging, chants of kill, looting, vandalism, and demands for execution by all white, maskless thugs. Why even attempt it? Why go through all that effort to write such a lengthy schpiel of ackbasswards drivel?

Everyone knows now the indisputable facts, and all you guys are doing is making us hate what you’ve done all the more. It’s not even that effective at heightening the polarity of the situation if this was created from a third party trying to sow dissent.

It’s just a new low in brain damage.

It got a high count of notes (most of them all from accounts I already blocked long ago, as the note count was meager when I actually went to see who) and they were all from the same insular cadre of manufactured boomer meme, overly candid (name and photo), military-pumped, stock image, no avatar/content (empty). They were programmed to frame it all as a “BLUE LIVES” situation (almost all the responses were bot programmed emojis of patriotic support).

...anyway, if one wants a gross peek into the most extremist derangement into those who are so far removed from reality that they even attempt this kind of upside down propaganda, then track down that account and scope that shitpost (and don’t be afraid to report a few posts and block and few accounts on the way).

Luckily, Tumblr gives me a track record of who takes interest in my content, so I may get an idea of who needs to get cut-off.

[kyleisme14]

My trip to Area 51 - unedited

On Facebook, a kid from Bakersfield created an event. He uses his page, perfectly named, shitposting because my life is in shambles and makes 'storm area 51, they can't stop us all' and seemingly overnight a million people said that they would be attending. I did attend. Shitposting because my life is in shambles is inadvertent the most zeitgeist worthy name for this page. Shitposting is when you share terrible content that you know is bad just to get a reaction. You are sharing a low effort joke for the sense of connection from others.  Because my life is in shambles, this anonymous statement of personal vulnerability, I shall try and make a low effort attempt at connection. This is what our age is all about. We are doomed to be as connected and as isolated as possible. This had a chance of being a real life meme where we'd be isolated no longer.

The page became an immediate stronghold for memes. It adopted other internet jokes like Karens asking to see managers, Kyle's drinking monster energy drink for invincibility, and Naruto runners being faster than bullets, as ways of infiltrating the base. And also generated new ones about what people would find inside Area 51 like the 10th doctor to recommend a toothpaste or where my girlfriend wants to go for dinner or how we'd sneak in with a minivan but escape with a space ship. The killer meme was how once we 'free them aliens' we'd keep them as lovers and bang them so hard that we 'clapped them cheeks'. This was the low effort comedy that this meme page generated.

Was it a joke or would people actually go? At first I did not know why I needed to go to area 51, and everybody seemed to ask me. I failed to recruit any friends to join me on the quest, 7 hours driving to the infamous base. Most thought I was crazy for going. My brother told me to be safe. My sister thought I was joking, and called to counter my bluff. Whenever somebody said they couldn't go, I pittied them because I was sure they were going to miss something incredible and life affirming. I was excited because I had no idea what was going to go down, and nobody in the whole world did. I stopped at the army surplus. I thought we'd either see a humanitarian crisis like fyre fest or a government crackdown. Don't forget, 2 million people clicked GOING online, so even if 1% came that'd be 10,000 people to a town with a population of  1000. The airforce released a warning about 'raiding' active military bases being a bad idea and the use of deadly force being a possibility. Lincoln County, one of nevadas sleepiest, had to call in enough police to potentially break up a neo-woodstock.

I always wanted to go to area 51 since I first learned about aliens as a kid. When I asked the big question of are we alone in the universe? If there was an answer, if somebody had the evidence, if it was anywhere, it was stored at area 51.  UFO's and little green men were hiding somewhere in Nevada... at least according to pop mythology. In grade school I would check out the same book over and over from the library, about aliens and the search for exterterestrial life and the scientists who were looking at the stars. There was a spooky section about times aliens might have visited early humans based on cave paintings and statues. And then the next page was all about area 51, where the government did secret expirements on alien artifacts and maybe had a specimen. So I've been captivated since at least then. Area 51 represents a big secret. A mystery! And somebody powerful, a general or established congress person, knows and is keeping the answers from us. So as an anti-establishment, meme and alien lover, I was fascinated with this 'movement,' that would of 'raid the base'. I wanted to go and find out how many people like me were out there! Turns out I wasn't completely alone! But... for the ignorant... What is Area 51? I could never believe people weren't following the biggest BREAKING news of our lives. But for those out of the loop, Area 51 is an infamous hotspot for UFO lovers. It has a rich history in alien folklore. But here is the factual history: Nevada is almost all federal land. and it was used back in the day for nuclear testing. an original tourist attraction to Las Vegas was watching nuclear testing in the distance...

Some airforce commanders were flying around dropping bombs when they spied a dried lakebed next to a mountain, Groom Lake. They landed on it and found it to be a perfectly flat natural runway. Excellent for testing expiremental aircraft. The facility became known as  Area 51. And was where the airforce and Lockheed Corp developed the U-2 stealth bomber. They brought the best and brightest scientists and engineers to develop new aeronautics and weaponry for the US military. At the height of the Cold War, any foreign technology that was aquired would be brought to Area 51 to be tested and backwards-engineered. You can imagine Chinese reactors and Russian jets being taken apart and used by the best tinkerer's and best test pilots. People at the highest levels of classified access. Because if you are one of the folks who are handling stolen foreign items, you are so classified that your spouse isn't supposed to know what you do all day. Yes honey, I was testing out the Ruskies new fighter plane! They don't even know we have it! These were experts in aeronautics and weapons science who could decipher technology even if the instructions were in another language... so perhaps if the US government were to encounter any other 'foreign technology' of an unknown origin, maybe they'd  send it to Area 51 to be backwards engineered? That's the set up, those are the facts, the rest is conjecture and tinfoil hats stuff. Like unexplained phenomena,  military released sightings that definitely aren't weather baloons and general mysticism. Do you believe in aliens or not?

If you believe that it's more likely that our government would keep aliens a secret than releasing that information to the public... welcome to the club! If not, do some reading. As I drove across the desert, down lonesome roads and through one horse towns, I realized what I was doing. I was driving into the middle of nowhere, likely to stand around doing nothing... and boy was I excited. My plan was to go and maybe film something and if that didn't work out I'd put on an alien costume and hold a sign. I figured that there'd be a bunch of cameras and I could use it to collectively protest all sorts of wrongs in the world. One of the initial reacitons to the playful event was, 'hey there are more imporant places to raid! why not raid the border detention centers, why not congress, why not the oil companies?' To which I say, hell yes... but that's not shitposting. That's being earnest and noble. This was about being ironic and part of a joke. This was about chasing an internet meme into the ground and disecting it until all that was left was the human connection. I had a sign and costume and figured that even if nobody showed up at least news organizations would be covering it.  The sign I held said, Peace on earth ain't coming from outer space, and I really believe that. We shouldn't expect peace to come from somewhere else in the universe, it has to start right here at home, inside each of us. I wanted to get that message out. The day of the event, due to classic internet decentralization, people debated whether the raid meet up (located at the Area 51 gate) should be at 3am on friday morning or 3am on saturday morning. Most people kind of agreed to just gather sporadically between those two times. I monitored a live stream late on thursday to confirm that millions of people weren't gathering to make American History. Instead, about 30 people gathered for that 3am moment. I only missed a photo-op. I awoke on friday morning and drove towards my destiny. There were two events scheduled. One hosted by the facebook Shitposting kid who decided to use his 15 minutes of fame to organize a rave in the desert at the local Little Ale'inn, a motel close to the gate. The other was set up by a filmmaker who made a movie about Area 51 at the Alien Research Center. Both locales are alien themed tchotchke paradises designed to sell the eager UFO tourist any manner of t-shirt, shot glass or Alien doll. These spots have a fun feel and would be desert trinket spots selling only desert sage and gems if not for the boon of being next to an infamous mystery base.

The dueling events were both hoping to capitalize on the rush of people to the desert for the raid. Alienstock, as shitpost called it, was going to be a kumbaya style gathering. But everybody thought it was an alibi for shitpost incase anybody got in actual trouble at the gate and roped him in. Shitpost from bakersfield ended up not even going to his own event out of fear. Also the county sued him for the cost of preparing for a potential fiasco. The Alien Research Center event was going to have famous Alien Community folks speak and some high end music performances. But as I drove down the dusty route 375, known as Exterterestrial Highway, I saw very few people on the roads. Lots and lots of cops. It became obvious that the whole county and the organizers of these events had been preparingor at least 30,000 people. They had nearly 200 port-a-potties. Which makes  sense, if 1% of the people who claimed they were coming online came! The reality was that maybe only 1% of 1% showed up to these sleepy nevada towns on the edge of a fabled military base. The imediate reality of the events was that they were extremely underattended, but that was also a blessing. it made everything a little bit more intimate and accessible. I pulled into the dusty parking lot of the Little Ale'inn to find a rag tag DIY music festival set up. People were essentially tailgating on the side of the road. It was a scene and it was dusty. All sorts of folks were jovially milling about, some in alien themed costume, many with cameras. Many folks with booze, despite the morning. I pulled out a camera and tried interviewing people, but found that everybody I talked to had the exact same talking points. Do you believe in aliens? Duh. Why are you here? Free them Aliens. Do you really think they are in the base? Yes, but maybe now they've been moved. What did you think would happen if we charged? We'd all get killed or arrested. Nobody seemed to have really believed in the facebook post's idea of 'they can't stop us all.' Most people were sure that, especially with the meager turn out, the military and police could stop us all. Everybody just wanted to see what would happen, expecting anywhere from fyre festival 2.0 to a bloodbath to nothing. Everybody had listened to the same Joe Rogan podcast, where he'd interviewed Bob Lazar who claims to have worked at the base. That podcast was the bible of this gathering and  was what had inspired Shitpost to shitpost.

It was special that everybody was a believer. That's rare that strangers are all on the same wavelength. Nobody seemed to have any doubts that the government knew about aliens and weren't telling the public. And it was agreed that UFO's had been tested and stored at the base. Everybody I ended up meeting seemed pretty prepared. They had plenty of water and booze and camping supplies, so the idea that a humanitarian crisis was going to occur dissapated completely and reminded me of a group outting to the desert. Most important was that everybody at the event seemed to be in on the joke. They might believe in aliens but had no plans of raiding the base in actuality. Aliens might exist but the might of the US government is way more certain. The police presence alone was insane, but they merely hinted at the military might behind the base's perimeter. The police actually became quite friendly once they realized it wasn't going to be a boodbath. But the silent and hooded guards behind the gate remained terrifying with big guns and big dogs. There was definitely the threat of violence if you crossed. But we all joked that maybe if a million more people showed up we'd actually start Naruto running passed the guards.

After a while of milling around quasi-interviewing people I decided there were enough people with cameras that I should just put on my alien costume and go to the gate and get in front of the camera. I was taken to the gate by some friends I'd made while trying to get interviews. Evan and Kevin were two dudes I became super weirdly close on the day of the Raid. Each of us had come by ourselves from far away, San Francisco, Boston and Los Angeles, with a vague intention of documenting it in some way. I had a vision of either a mini doc or article, Evan was a photographer and who took some insanely beautiful photos (featured here).

Kevin was a video creation guru who just wanted to make as much instagram content as possible. Kevin was by far the most successful, he's got that showman's knack to always get on camera with insanely high energy. There were a lot of cameras and each one he'd run up to and start lecturing about how the governemnt needed to release the secret documents! It was a great bit especially with his Boston Townie accent turned all the way up.

Evan explained how he was drawn to the site by a mysterious desire to see what would happen.  He expressed it best as, 'this is like a reddit safe post.' People will find safes while remodeling or cleaning a house and say, 'hey reddit, look i found a safe, i'm going to open it and see what's inside!' Then people get excited trying to guess what marvelous jackpot could be in that old dusty safe. They wait desperately for the original poster to share an update. More often than not the poster never returns and people are left waiting for nothing.

Once and a while there will be an updated post to show what was found inside and sometime's it's a haul of trinkets and dubloons and rare items that were saved throughout time to be found by some noble internet user. but then most of the time it's like, wow a roll of coins from 1953! "so yeah i felt obligated to go and find out what was in the safe and share it with reddit even if there actually was nothing inside. reddit deserves to know.' evan said. Because sometimes those posts are just as important, the safe find coming back to say, 'hey we cracked the safe, but turns out there was nothing in it! here's a picture of an empty safe."

So I was beginning to realize that I was standing inside an empty safe. But wow, all of these people had also come to be here and that was something special. It's not often that we get to organically be around likeminded strangers that all have such clear and imediate shared experience. Here we all were, because of a a meme, just to see what would happen. The gathering had a magical quality because we were an internet joke that had left the cyber space and entered the meat space. It was a silly idea that was reaching a physical end point.

I stood around the gate for a good while, we chatted with everybody, shook hands with the police guarding the gate, exchanged instagram handles and shared jokes we'd heard on the internet. You could tell people were really cutting loose. Most people spent most of their time on their computers it seemed. Hey, me too. We shouted 'clap them cheeks' and 'let them out.' We were all in on the joke. There were still mainly cameras and I got interviewed and photographed by dozens including history channels ancient aliens and the nytimes and countless youtubers and instagramers. It all kind of culminated when Kevin and Evan were getting cold and saying we should leave, I heard a distant 'clap them cheeks' chant and booty shuffling down the lonesome road to the infamous Area 51 gate was Riley Reid! Pornhub's number 1 star. She's somebody I have searched for all my life, on google. She did a strip tease and pretended to rush the gate. She was an internet hero in the flesh, and she was in on the joke too! A perfect metaphor, eh?

The next morning, hungover from the excitement and extrovertism of the day before I was sitting in a diner scouring news websites for mentions of the raid and looking for photos of myself. Behind me I heard some locals discussing, a gravelly voice said, "usually this town has 1 car every 10 minutes. this weekend we've got like 1 car every minute!" The townsfolk seemed to have had the wildest weekend of their lives. Me too. I managed to get into a few articles in my green alien suit.  A USA Today affiliate newspaper even printed a whole write up about me and my sign. On the way back, realizing I expected nothing, and found little more than nothing, I was completely satisfied. I had held my sign for peace and found a version of it, internet strangers, weirdos from all over had gathered peacefully to celebrate an idea. A silly and anti authoritarian conspiracy idea, but an idea none the less. I decided the reason I was drove all this way through beautiful american desert land, was because it's something I would have thought was cool as an 11 year old. A mission to see aliens and the people who wanted to meet them. Radical.

[littlemulattokitten]

Dating App Conundrums

Alright so I’ve been planning to do this for a while, and may make a thing out of it just to chronicle the adventure from single to hopefully not, but who knows. 

Basically I decided to research a few dating apps and try them out, since I’m the type of person who’s content to stay home, but also only likes going out with a friend or small group (not alone) - therefore my chances of meeting people are probably in the negatives without dating services like the ones I’m currently on.

This post will probably end up being both a review of some of these apps as well as a master shitpost detailing the adventures of a straight female attempting to find a straight male to date online. And I know Tumblr well enough that at least half the people who read this will have yet another reason to be proud of their not straight orientation. Because good fucking lord the nonsense I’ve seen.

Storytime begins below the cut. This isn’t going to be short. That’s your warning. It will probably be funny at some points though. It’s funny to live it, at least. And I may break it into parts, Idk yet.

Let’s get a few things out of the way first.

Until this experiment, I’d never used dating apps ever. I knew of them. Hated them on principle (dislike them even more now, but we’ll get into that later) and wanted nothing to do with them. I knew a few people who were happily married to a Match.com or OKCupid match but aside from that – I’d never even downloaded Tinder like everyone else I knew in HS and college.

I haven’t actually dated anyone since my first semester of college. On purpose. I broke off my engagement to my elementary school sweetheart (thankfully we are still good friends and our friendship recovered from that near disaster) and I just wanted to focus on myself for a while.

The small handful of relationships I have had that lasted longer than 6 months taught me a lot about what I want in my ideal mate. The one or two less-than-6-months-barely-relationships I had in high school taught me A LOT about what I will never put up with from people.

My “type” isn’t reflective of my dating history. I’ve gotten to the point with these apps where I’m combining their shallow-indorsing metrics with my own personal preferences. Basically going through an aesthetic checklist then scanning through their profile to see if the actual person is equally pretty.

Spoiler, I have to swipe left A LOT.

I’m a very particular person. I’m very introverted and I hate when someone makes conversation harder than it has to be. I can hold a conversation. I just refuse to be the only one putting effort into it. (This makes more sense later)

I’m beyond fed up with dating app culture but my perfect or close enough to perfect guy has gotta exist so most of my accounts will remain I fucking guess.

I’m not necessarily looking for Mr. Forever. I’ll gladly keep him if I find him, but I’m also not looking for a relationship that I know will be temporary. I don’t do things by halves. I want something solid, whether it lasts forever or not depends on a lot of things.

I CAN’T EMOTIONALLY MULTITASK. I can really only give one person my full interest and attention at a time, which doesn’t bode well for these apps bc you gotta be able to bounce form one to the next no matter how excited you were about someone. These apps fucking suck.

Okay. Now let’s begin properly.

I started with Bumble. Yes. I know. Introverted female starting on a dating app that requires her to make the first move. That can’t go badly right.

I damn near have a panic attack every time I get a match I stg. Anyway.

I was skeptical at first. I’m not huge on people knowing a lot about me from the outset (or I wasn’t - i give so much less of a fuck now bc it makes almost no difference on these things) so my profile was pretty threadbare and cold. Now, a few weeks later, my profile is an efficient snapshot with a splash of Slytherin “Don’t fucking test me.”

Did I mention I’m an INTJ Scorpio? Yeah my entire approach is gonna scream that and my Hogwarts house, just you wait.

Round 1 ~ Bumble 🐝🍯

Okay so Bumble is interesting. For those who don’t know, it’s basically Beehive-Themed Tinder except for heterosexual couples, the lady has to initiate conversation. (Either party in a same sex match can message first) She has 24 hours from the point where her and a fella have “matched” to do so, then he has 24 hours to respond and seal the match – ending the time limits.

Bumble also gives you a rough estimate of how far away someone is sometimes. I’ve read articles about how bumble’s location estimate feature has ruined relationships forged through bumble and generally turned women into paranoid psychos over matches. Can. Fucking. Confirm. It’s the most annoying thing ever. Why?

Android vs Apple. That’s literally why.

The way Bumble’s location service is supposed to work is that everytime you open the app, it updates your location based on your phone or computer’s location. As far as I can tell, that’s exactly how it works on my android phone.

Apple users. Y’all are a problem. Not because I give a shit about your iPhone, I don’t give a shit do you ffs, but IOS location permissions can allow apps to update your location without the app being open.

Reread that for me.

Without. The app. Being. Open.

Which basically means if you match checks your profile, they can tell whether you’re where you were when they swiped right (say, 26 miles away) versus, oh idfk, a whole state or two away.

Real specific example I know. Why? Because I ended up unmatching a guy I REALLY wanted to get to know better because of it.

Though, to be fair, guys are really lax about how they behave on these apps in my opinion, which is a bigger problem than the stupid IOS setting.

Allow me to explain.

Dating App Etiquette 

It barely exists, but it should. Here’s the thing. On these apps, you basically swipe right on a pretty face and left on one you’re not interested in waking up to in the morning or sitting on. I’m only being half funny here. I’m convinced people use dating apps more for hookups than their intended purpose. Which, whatever, but for fuck’s sake make BumbleHookup. There’s BumbleDating, DumbleFriends, and BumbleNetwork or whatever. Just make BumbleDTF so we can filter these people out already.

BACK TO THE SINFULLY ATTRACTIVE AND INTERESTING DUDE I UNMATCHED

I’m still kinda peeved about this. In part at myself, but also just in general.

Most people seem to treat Bumble like Tinder. They don’t fill out their profile hardly at all. Have less than 3 pictures, have pictures that make it unclear who’s profile it is, or – my least favorite thing that is almost 100% regional – THEY REALLY FUCKING THINK A PICTURE OF THEM IN SUNGLASSES HOLDING A FUCKING FISH THEY JUST CAUGHT IS ATTRACTIVE. IT IS NOT. THAT’S NOT WHAT THE PICTURES ARE FOR. JUST SAY YOU LIKE TO FISH IN YOUR FUCKING PROFILE BECAUSE IF I HAVE TO LOOK AT ONE MORE MOTHER FUCKING FISH-

I’ve seen a lot of fish in the last few weeks. Like. So many that I’m basically auto swiping left if someone’s profile has less than 4 pictures and one or more contains a stupid fucking fish.

LOOK AT MY FUCKING USERNAME. LITTLEMULATTOKITTEN. IF A SELF-IDENTIFYING CAT TRAPPED IN A HUMANS BODY SAYS THERE’S TOO MANY FUCKING FISH – THERE ARE TOO MANY MOTHER FUCKING FISH.

I can guarantee this won’t be my last fish rant. You don’t understand how many fucking fish I’ve seen.

BUT THIS GUY DIDN’T HAVE ANY FISH IN HIS PROFILE.

So he already had my fucking attention. He was also startlingly handsome – not in a oh you exist off puss and nothing else there’s no other way someone as pretty as you with a penis could exist – but like “Oh. I’d…really like to look at that forever and sit on it if you’ll let me please.”

NOT ONLY DID I FIND HIM THAT ATTRACTIVE BUT HE SWIPED RIGHT ON ME TOO AND READ ENOUGH OF MY PROFILE TO ASK ME A QUESTION FROM THE LOWER HALF OF IT.

I was freaking the fuck out excited.

And frankly the odds of him seeing this are so fucking low that I’ll go ahead and tell you some specifics about the short convo we had, but nothing that could lead anyone back to him obviously.

He’d lived in my home state. First thing he asked was which city I was from. Then he guessed, claiming that guess was based off a beanie I was wearing in my second to last (I think) image available on my profile.

He’d lived in my home CITY. Which means he was familiar with the CULTURE. And would probably GET ME MORE THAN MOST GUYS IN MY AREA.

He worked in an industry/field I knew about and had almost gone into myself.

He was so fucking attractive. I have yet to come across someone who checked ever preliminary shallow box on my want list.

Biceps. Listen. We’re all a little shallow. Biceps do to me what ass and tiddy do to some guys. It’s one of the few really fucking strong visual things I have, followed by dark hair and blue eyes. But he was something of a gym rat, for sure, and I’d gladly torture myself at the gym if that man was going to be in my line of sight at all during the process.

Seriously. I’ve never seen someone who didn’t look like they had to be famous or an alien that made me go “He’s so pretty I want to cry.” EVER. I WANT TO CRY THINKING ABOUT IT BECAUSE WE’RE NOT MATCHED ANYMORE.

And last but not least – like almost every fucking match I’ve ever made, I could count his replies on one hand before he went radio silent.

So, how does this relate to that location issue, you may ask.

Because I didn’t fucking know that Bumble could update your location on some devices without you opening the app.

There’s no online/activity indicator for Bumble except their location updating. Which, when you’re really excited to get to know someone and they suddenly vanish, but they’re more likely than not still online, you might start to feel like you’ve been put on hold.

Life stuff, yes, makes sense, I get it. But these apps have push notifications (which can be buggy) and if you’ve matched with someone, odds are you’re interested enough to check back on occasion (unless you aren’t). So it quickly became a worry game.

Because, like I said, I can’t just say “I’m excited about you, but I’ll keep browsing”. I don’t work that way. Unless I’m not excited about someone, then yeah I’ll keep scatter-shotting. But if I’m not excited to get to know someone why the fuck would I swipe right.

Anyway. After a few days of silence, I was disappointed and getting bitter and the few proverbial bones I’d thrown him had gone unanswered. I knew I was overthinking it and letting my own insecurities get to me a bit, but at the end of the day, there’s a few general courtesies that should exist in online dating culture that don’t.

Why people are afraid or hesitant to say they’re too busy to respond much in their profiles is beyond me. Some guys have the right idea announcing that they’re bad at checking the app and offering their snapchat or telling matches to ask for it.

But even if you’re testing the waters with another match, we’re all on this app for the same fucking reason. Say so. I’m not the kind of person who will need to, because I don’t operate that way on these apps, but I would. Because if that person is really bothered by you finding out if you’re more compatible with someone you matched with prior to them, that tells you something about them.

Would I have been disappointed if that had been the case with this guy? Yeah, kinda. I probably would have felt like his second choice at best, even if he’d come back to chatting with me. But that’s how these fucking apps are designed. Buckle up or unmatch. Fuck your emotions and self-esteem.

I unmatched for my sanity, because that happened a few days into this whole experiment and I wasn’t on any other sites yet. I wasn’t really prepared to deal with this whole thing yet and I didn’t know what to expect. I felt like shit and decided that if he showed up in my feed again, maybe I’d super swipe him (paid extra special right swipe that tells them you REALLY like their face and whatever) but I still don’t know what I’ll do if he does. 

Lowkey hoping it was all a misunderstanding and whatever but like, not at all holding out for that because what are the fucking odds.

And again, my disappointment stems mostly from the fact that I was really excited to get to know him. The idea of finding someone on this stupid app in less than a week who wasn’t forcing his fish pictures in my face, would absolutely be the type of person to encourage my own wellness goals, and who was obviously smart because of his career path, was such an exciting thought. If we’d hit it off and gotten along really well, I’d have been so many levels of shocked and overwhelmingly happy that I just don’t know what I’d do.

When someone who looks like they’re 100% your type actually reads your profile and swipes right – you get excited. I was really excited. I’m still a little sad/disappointed, but I’m basically over it.

Other Misc. Things I’ve Learned On Bumble and other Dating Apps As a Relationship Seeking User

Take every profile with a grain of salt unless it’s so blatantly straightforward. And then still toss a pinch in.

The pretty pretty pretty buff boys who look like their players but their profiles claim they want a relationship? Odds are still players. They will try to convince you there’s 10 inches in their pants. They clearly aren’t smart enough to know that’s biologically uncomfortable for females and the best way to end up in the emergency room with a ruined cervix so don’t even swipe right. They’ll just ask for nudes.

People who use dating sites have some odd, hive mind fixation with The Office.

“Jim looking for his Pam” is in most profiles. I’m not sure why. References to The Office or mentions of The Office are about as common as all the stupid fucking fish.

I live in the wrong part of the country to find guys I’m actually going to share interests with. Just wait until I tell you about my experience so far on OK Cupid. I literally won’t find anyone where I live unless they’re from somewhere culturally similar to where I was born and are willing to move back with me. Because I am not fucking staying in the land of the god damn fish forever.

Most people don’t look at religion and politics like I do. Which is “You do you, I’ll do me, we won’t talk about it and we can peacefully do each other.” I don’t fucking care if your politics contradict mine if that’s the only thing we have not in common. Just make it a blacklisted subject and don’t let one frankly insignificant difference of opinion ruin an entire relationship or potential relationship. And same with religion. I’m not even a little religious. I don’t care if my future husband is unless it’s in my face constantly, he tries to “convert me”, get me to go to church with him, or some other blatant disrespect of my own religious standing. You worship whatever you want. I’ll right fanfiction about magic demon princes fucking their human-born demon queen every which way to Sunday. If religion is that big of a fucking deal for you, be upfront about it. Most people are in their bios. Either way, I’m really fucking sick of people who put too much weight into these two things like they actually decide how compatible you are with someone unless you let them.

I fucking hate fish.

Dating apps need more filters and ways to narrow down searches. 90% of the filters already present are shallow as all hell. What’s a few more.

Primarily let me filter out a few NAMES. This sounds super picky, but I have a really big family. 7 uncles. Over 20 cousins including the few cousins of mine who have kids. There’s a few names that would just be weird and awkward for me to associate with a significant other. If I could filter out my stepdad’s first name (which is disgustingly common but still), my biological father’s name, and a few of my uncle’s names, that’d be fucking swell. You already let me filter by religion and race. Let me filter out some fucking names damnit.

And there have to be people who have traumatic associations with names too like?????

The Office is a funny, good show and all but WHY IS EVERYONE ON THESE APPS FUCKING OBSESSED WITH IT THE WAY I’M OBSESSED WITH HARRY POTTER. I’VE SEEN IT. IT’S NOT **THAT** FUCKING FUNNY. SOMEONE EXPLAIN.

YOU HOLDING A DEAD FISH ISN’T FUCKING ATTRACTIVE SIR. THIS ISN’T THE SHAPE OF WATER. SHOW ME YOUR FACE NOT YOUR FISH.

The dating apps that are probably actually worth using all require a paid subscription.

There’s no real way to advertise that you find sex and physical intimacy very important in a relationship without making yourself sound like a cock-thirsty whore. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, you do you, but I’m looking for someone to be a slut FOR, I’m not one already and I dislike not being able to be upfront about that without being profiled or attracting fuckboys.

WHY CAN I NOT FILTER OUT PROFILES THAT CONTAIN IMAGES OF FISH

STOP WITH THE FUCKING FISH COUNTRY BOYS. ARE YOU LOOKING FOR A GIRLFRIEND OR SOMEONE TO KEEP TRACK OF YOUR TACKLEBOX? AND DON’T TELL ME THAT’S THE SAME THING, MY FAMILY IS COUNTRY. IT AIN’T THE SAME FUCKING THING. ALL THAT FISH TELLS ME IS THAT YOU’RE PROBABLY COMPENSATING FOR SOMETHING.

Judging by the few fish-fucks with their profiles filled out at all – they’re compensating for personality.

With how shallow the filters on these sites are, just go ahead and fucking add eye color, hair, etc. Seriously. If you’re gonna let me be shallow enough to only pick men of a certain ethnicity, and religion, you may as fucking well let me see if I can find a guy with blue eyes, biceps, dark hair, non religious, who doesn’t want kids without reading every fucking profile I come across.

There are way more guys on these sites who want or think they want children some day. This baffles me. But then again my primary reason for not wanting children is pregnancy and giving birth which wouldn’t be their problem so of course they want them.

I just need to auto left-swipe if I see a fish. These apps are shallow anyway. Do not make a fucking fishing joke just because I said shallow.

OK Cupid has a better matching system than Bumble and such, but it’s still irritating as all hell. You can’t choose question categories that are more important. So if I see a 91% match, but he has no sex questions filled out or our sexual compatibility is like…50%...that’s not REALLY a 91% match for me. Let me mark 2 or 3 question categories as priority for fucks sake.

The bulk of guys on these apps fall into 2 categories (for me anyway) – Not enough giveadamn to explain their presence on the site & thank u, next.

Online dating is disappointing as fuck.

I’m seriously going to lose my mind if I can’t get away from the fucking fish pictures. ENOUGH. I GET IT. I NEED TO MOVE.

Seriously – I. Need. To. Move. Back. Home. I am not meant for this part of the country. These good ole boys are meant for someone but it ain’t me and my family is fucking country. I’ve been fishing, ridden 4-wheelers, made shit out of wood for shits and giggles, helped my grandparents in the garden, eaten deer my grandfather or uncles hunted and prepared, helped chop wood, ridden in the bed of a truck, etc etc etc. But ya bitch has lifestyle goals that only include mud at scheduled times. We can go camping, but we should also go out to dinner sometimes and go clubbing or dancing other times.

I was not born with this ass to settle for a man who looks like an angel and acts like one too. Why is no one non-ironically blunt about their sexual preferences?  You cannot convince me that the majority of men lack strong opinions on this subject. SERIOUSLY. IT IS 2019 NOT 1619. God DAMNIT. You’re on a DATING SITE. THAT’S AN ASPECT OF RELATIONSHIPS THAT CAN MAKE OR BREAK THEM. BE STRAIGHTFORWARD.

It’s not even actually about sharing every interest. I don’t give a shit if he doesn’t like Harry Potter much. If he’s annoyed by the level I like it, yeah that’s an issue. Otherwise, be supportive and kind about that kinda shit. That’s all I’m asking for. That’s how I am in return.

I make shit with yarn, write off the wall fanfiction, have a lot of sexual interests I don’t usually broadcast, and don’t understand how dating sites are still this ineffective in 2019.

This is super long already so I’m gonna save the other apps for a separate installment if this one is enjoyed or whatever. Jesus. These apps, guys.

Apps I still need to talk about that probably won’t require this many words each – Hinge, Coffee Meets Bagel, OkCupid (OkC might need a few thousand words).

I’ll probably look into some other niche dating sites too because at this point, what the fuck ever - I just wanna meet someone back home or willing to move back home with me who fits some reasonable criteria parameters. And I’m not even as picky as half the profiles I’ve seen, lemme tell ya. I’m just fucking opinionated. And beyond sick of this experiment already.

Sigh.

If I ever see a fish again it’ll be too soon. Bet the first profile picture on my bumble dash later will be another fucking fish though.

Those who expressed interest: @accio-echo  |  @infallibleangel  | @aconitumluparia  and those who liked are my followers so you’ll see it. This post is so long my browser is bugging out with tags or I’d tag you all too.

[zanrai-kid]

I have no legitimate sleep schedule, so take my list of my Top 20 favorite Gorillaz tracks

20: Momentz - In the same league as Feel Good Inc., don't at me.

19: Stylo - Mos Def and Bobby Womack absolutely devastating on the bridges. Hearing Jeremih perform this live was gorgeous.

18: Humility - Gorillaz made a summer jam, and it sure sounds like it. Damon's getting old, man. Just wants to retire, wants to have a few beers by the beach. 

17: Sleeping Powder - iwasgone I M B A C K ASDKJHAJSDHGSKDJHFGKJHASGLDKJAGSD

16: Feel Good Inc. - A legendary song in my formative years, and a soundtrack to the Bush administration as important as “American Idiot”. Only so low on the list because of oversaturation.

15: Rhinestone Eyes - This song is the embellished production of Plastic Beach in a moment. I once made a mashup with this song and "Kangaroo Court" by Capital Cities.

14: Re-Hash - First song on the first album, and it slaps.

13: Ascension - Vince Staples is such a brilliant voice in the latter half of the decade, and I'm pleased to see Damon Albarn recognize this.

12: DARE - Hot damn, this song is a jam.

11: M1 A1 - Hearing this song kick off a Gorillaz concert feels like getting shot by a cannon. It's the "most like the sound the pilliows exuded on the FLCL soundtrack" song in the Gorillaz discography, and for that, I like it.

10: Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey's Head - When Gorillaz want to tell a horror story, they double down and get Dennis Hopper to tell a story of apocalypse. Demon Days is such an immortal album, and this song will live on as a ubiquitous reminder of one's mortality at the hands of greed. Good one for the pessimistic crowds of both 2005 and 2019.

9: Rock the House - BETTER THAN CLINT EASTWOOD. FIGHT ME. When Gorillaz sample audio, they make sure to make the most of it. The ten second sample of John Dankworth's "Modesty Blaise" carries Del the Funky Homosapien's bragging boogie rap through to another level with the tight bass riffs the self-titled album is known for. Echo effects, horn stabs, a fucking recorder. This tracks fucks me up.

8: Souk Eye - I think a track off of The Now Now is one of the best works in the Gorillaz discography. Primarily because following Humanz and The Now Now, Albarn and Hewlett are in a strange time of their lives. Both are now 50 years old, and Gorillaz has lasted 20 years. The concept has run its course for now. To hear this song close this chapter of the Gorillaz story feels fitting. A love song to the many miles taken, only to realize one must leave their current circumstances in order to survive.

7: Last Living Souls - It's a cliche to say a song builds, but when the track starts with little more than a drum machine, and leads to an acoustic breakdown and string section breakdown back-to-back, you can agree this song builds. A lush atmosphere of tiny bleeps and bloops coming together to become greater than the sum of all parts. The song sounds so down and muted on the album, but hearing it live, it feels like a war cry. Both interpretations fit the themes of Demon Days, and it's a good one to start off the album following the Dawn of the Dead sampled "Intro".

6: El Mañana - Hearing this song follow "Busted and Blue" accompanied by visuals of Noodle during the Humanz Tour is the closest I've come to a religious experience at a concert. The sudden immediacy of the situation following "Feel Good Inc" is made aware from sirens and Damon delivering a ragged vocal delivery. The track ebbs and flows in and out of deep bass and washed out highs. It feels like a sigh. It feels like crying. And if you're a Gorillaz lore sucker like I am, this track accompanies the death of Noodle, the single most important event in the canon. Also, the acoustic version reminds one how good Damon is at evoking very quiet emotion.

5: Tomorrow Comes Today - When those drums come in, man, you get teleported to the turn of the millennium. Dirty trip-hop was coming out of the UK en masse, Fatboy Slim released one of my favorites albums of all time "Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars", and Daft Punk's "Discovery" was still a year off. In between some of the most important music of my life being dropped, Gorillaz dropped their first single "Tomorrow Comes Today" at the end of the year and solidified their place for years to come. Slinking and sly, velvety and smoky. This is Gorillaz sending up a culture of basement shows and turntablism. If Think Tank is the first "Gorillaz album", this is when the transition was made manifest.

4: On Melancholy Hill - Ugh, this song. This song is pretty. Full stop. It's one of Gorillaz' very few love songs, and it still manages to capture the plasticine sadness of Plastic Beach. Plastic Beach was my first real and honest introduction to Gorillaz in college, as I only remember hearing about Demon Days from advertising in 2005, when I was 12. This track was just a treat to hear in spring/summer, and a reason I made so many (see: too many) of my finals about Gorillaz. Around the time Humanz was teased, I went back and realized this song had held up so well. It's just a universal sentiment about how the world we know is falling apart, but let's have this moment together. The acoustic version is an honest to God lullaby. Something I can play my future children. Not bad for only 16 lines of lyric.

3: Empire Ants - If "On Melancholy Hill" is about finding the beauty in ruin, "Empire Ants" holds a magnifying glass up to ruin, wondering how it came to be. Listening to the album, "Superfast Jellyfish" came just before. A satirical take on consumeristic meals leading into a song about how we are personified as ants, marching in tandem to complete our tasks and build ever outward, never truly satisfied until death. It is a reminder to look upon the greater picture that is our world and see the moments of tranquility for what they are. Sadly, these moments do not last, and Little Dragon's part reminds us we are part of a machine, ever moving, ever crumbling. It is beauty interrupted by obligation, and for a kid who was in college when this album dropped, and who is now 26 and facing a lifetime of having to make my own decisions, it's an anthem.

2: Hong Kong - I remember loading the entirety of Plastic Beach onto my iPod Nano, and having an iTunes gift card left to spend from Christmas/birthday/etc. Having seen the Demon Days Live concert, I knew this track had to be on my beautiful iPod Nano. That, and for some reason, "Dirty Harry (Schtung Chinese New Year Remix). I remember long car rides staring out the window, listening to this track as the scenery blew by. I remember reading up on this track's history, how it was released in-between Demon Days and Plastic Beach and it shows, how it's a tale of neo-industrial China and Hong Kong's place in both Chinese and British history. This is both a love letter and warning to the nation of the apocryphal train ride that inspired Demon Days. In a world where China seems to be ever rising, "Hong Kong" is a song that asks questions of how this will affect the world as a whole, using Hong Kong as a metaphor. That's nothing to say of the wondrous instrumentation, the piano part in particular on my wishlist of "Songs I Should Learn on Piano Before I Die". Many call it Gorillaz' most underrated track, and I agree full stop.

1: DoYaThing - I'M THE SHIT. I SAID I'M THE SHIT. Above all else, Gorillaz is a collaborative effort of hundreds of musicians from all walks of life. When you throw James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, a band that rose in the same timeframe as Gorillaz, and Andre 3000, my personal pick for the G.O.A.T., magic happens. Uncut, unedited, 13 minute magic happens. Is it a bit of a meme? Sure. It is a shitpost disguised as a legitimate song? Why not. But sometimes, the goofy aspect of Gorillaz can craft audio gold. And aren't we all about memes on this blog? Albarn's at his most snotty white boy. Murphy's production and vocals are a reminder he was every music nerd's wet dream in the 2000s. Andre 3000 is just laying into every line with a confidence not heard since Stankonia. Everything about this song is designed and manufactured to sound like it it running off the rails in a fit of confidence. It is both wildly powerful and mournfully unaware. In short, to quote the great music critic Todd in the Shadows on the subject of LCD Soundsystem’s song “Losing My Edge”, "(It is) a critical darling... This was tailor made for critics. It is perfect music nerd bait, total pandering." DoYaThing, my favorite Gorillaz song of all time.

[fapangel]

SO what do you what will happen now with the whole fake Bomer guy supposedly be a trump supporter? Do you think the blue wave will restart or is it too little to late?

The most significantrevelation of the mail-bomber incident was that the Republicanmainstream – not the usual fringe kooks, but the levelheaded,respected commentators – immediately suspected it to be amanufactured “October Surprise.”

Some of those knee-jerktweets have since been deleted, likelyfor the same reason that I was more alarmed that I could entertain a“false flag” theory in the first place than I was by the possible“false flag” itself. Embracing asinine conspiracy theoriesis, to me, a hallmark of left-wing agitprop, an indelible impressionfrom my formative Bush-era youth when ~Halliburton~ and~Bush’s cabinet of puppeteers who have Jewish last names~was unceasingly invoked in anypolitical argument. And yet, despite knowing theoverwhelming odds of a lone lunatic being the perp (as indeed theywere) and my own decades-old biases against conspiracy theories, Istill found myselfmuttering dubiously.

Iwasn’t alone in that impression – the NewYork Times picked up on it too, and as is their wont managed todisclose their unique myopia as well. In their effort to equate allright-wing media to Alex “Lizardman Chemtrails” Jones’s usualconspiracytainment bullshit, theydrop this revealing paragraph:

Mr.Jones has been largely pushed tothe fringes of the internet — kicked off Twitter, Facebook and adozen other services — and his cries for attention now seem mostlypitiful. (This week, he was filmed yellingat a pile of manure outsidea rally for President Trump in Texas.) Buthis spirit lives on in the larger universe of pro-Trump media, whichhas fused the conspiratorial grandeur of Infowars with an unshakablefaith in Mr. Trump’s righteousness.

Theyautomatically equate media exposure of an idea with how manyviewers believe the idea. The thesis of the article lies inthese two sentences; Alex Jones has been silenced, but the moremainstream right-wing media has picked up his ideas, and that’s whythey’re still alive.

Thisalone speaks volumes about the media’s worldview, but to reallydrive it home see thisarticle wherein the reporter blames Trump’s attacks on themedia for their plummeting popularity, as if the Great PresidentialPumpkin can sway millions of Americans into hating themainstream media via his eldritch mind-control rays. This is why theyspeak of “an unshakable faith in Mr. Trump’s righteousness-”leftists view the world in terms of stupid mobs and the influentialdemagogues that sway and lead them. They simply cannot comprehendthat their own actions have shattered the public’s trust in them,despite the problem long predating Trump (one of my Journalism 101professors cited trust polling that consistently put Journalistsbelow used car salesmen back in 2007!) They find it easier tobelieve that their vast media empires’ combined megaphone is beingdrowned out by RumpleTrumpskien pied piping on his magical racistdogwhistle than to admit that people might think for themselves longenough to call them out on their egregious lies.

Thisdovetails nicely with recent revelations thatthe FBI leaked information to the press, then cited said “reporting”to the Justice Dept. as justification for further investigations,including FISA wiretapping warrants. Whilethe media’s lunacy is frequently amusing – reporters leaningdramatically into nonexistent wind, CNN’sfit over a panel truck blocking their stalker peephole in the hedge,or going bugfuck insane because Trumphad dinner without informing the media – nobody’s laughinganymore. And it’s precisely because of the growing understandingamong the populace of how the media has wantonly abused its power toaid the abuse of Federal power to nullify the results of a democraticelection.As Ian Miles Cheong said; “if the media can lie about somethingas insignificant as a koipond feeding ceremony, what else are they lying about?”

Well,now we know – and the people don’t seem amused.

I’vecovered the media’s worldview and demonstrable myopia before; Iaddress it in this instance to show thatthe media simply cannot adapt their message. Indeed,the NYT article on fringe-to-mainstream cites the mocking/pol/ “suspicious devices” meme without apparentunderstanding of how it undermines their implicit assumptions mereparagraphs prior of deplatforming speakers equalingthe silencing of their ideas. Theleft-wing “mobs and demagogues” is more than theory to them; it’show they organize – which is why John Oliver’s sick Friday nightburns are being repeated ad nauseam on Facebook by early Saturdaymorning. Theleft truly cannotmeme;it’s simply how they function. So when RumpleTrumpskien needles themedia into talking All About Themselves instead of the issues at handyetagain, iteffectively makes the mediathe issue at hand – and given that pollingconsistently shows that many Democrats are coming to distrust themedia of late, that’s not a strong issue for the DNC.Conversely, right-wingers will be shitposting the latest dank memeswith or without Alex Jones’s Twitterfeed, comehellor Maxine Waters.

Thusly,I conclude the mail bomber incident won’t have a significant impacton the electoral map – notjust because of widespread cynicism engendered by constant mediafalsehoods, but also because the structural problems that producedsuch alsocripple the media’s ability to exploit such incidents. In fact, themedia’s incredible blindness makes them likely to harmthe left-wing’s cause by doubling down on narratives that wereasinine the first time around. There is no bad news for the DNC thatthe media’s mental illness cannot make worse. Takethe latest example of thesynagogue shooter thatturnedout to be a Trump-hater who thought POTUSwas controlled Jews. Theusual hate-mongeringWaPo crowd actuallydug up the “star-shapedbackground graphic in a campaign ad” gem that was laughablelunacy beforeTrumpmoved the US embassy to Jerusalem and made defending Israel in the UNa cornerstone of US foreign policy. Thisis placed at the topofthe article, as if it’s a powerful and convincing lead-in to thelong-winded paranoid rambling of “troll armies” motivated by theusual mystic ~coded signals~ mentioned later on. Eventhe more sober-sounding takes likethis NYT hit-piece must open by blaming Trump for the crimes ofTrump-supporters andTrump-haters,which obliges the author to afascinating attempt in pissing up a rope without getting wet.

Itnaturally follows, then, that breathless media polling reports citing85% and upwards chances of a “blue wave” retaking the House areabout as trustworthy as similar polling in 2016. Even Nate Silver’smuch-vaunted “538” polling agency has come under prettypointed criticism for the number of times they’ve shrugged offsimilar “80%” predictions that haven’t come to pass – froma Harvard professor, no less. Furthermore,midterm elections are different in many ways – local issues oftenhave people more fired up (read, pissed off,) especially regardinggubernatorial elections. Since midterms are traditionally very lowturnout, a popular gubernatorial candidate can have a huge impact on“down-ballot” races – i.e. people show up to vote for thegovernor, and vote straight party ticket for alltheother candidates, US House included. In short, the polls mean jackdiddly squat, soeveryone’s simply reporting what they want (if you don’t believeme, look no further than Fox News’s reportinga nail-biting dead heat currently, then thisSeptember 22ndarticle on how dismissing “blue wave” rhetoric as the bullshit itis could suppress the Republican vote via overconfidence.A “dead heat” narrative is the safest way to turn out votes; norisk of overconfidence or hopelessness keeping people away from thepolls.) Soto evaluate the potentials, we must turn to the murkiest of allpolitical-forecastingcrystal balls - “energy levels.”

There’sbeen multiple media-exacerbated own-goals for the left in thatregard, most notably the mind-blowingly vicious smear campaignagainstJustice Kavanaugh that only managed to rile the right wing via sheeroutrage even more than the left. I could roll this one around fora while – talking about the surprising pluralities (note therelatively high numbers of Democrats and low numbers of Republicans“Very Angry” over Kavanaugh’s suffering; a surprisinglycenter-right plurality,) or how big the Republican benefit really was(Republicans being moderately more outraged than Democrats amounts toa low gain if Democrats enteredthe fray with high outrage already; but it’s likely that manyRepublicans who didn’t care at all before are outraged now).Butthere’s a larger factor to contend with – the historical realitythat the party controlling the Executive usually loses seats in theHouse in midterm elections. It happens with regularity for the samereason PoliSci101 shows you a “standardized plot” of Presidential approvalratings over time – human nature. Whoever’s in charge gets blamedfor everything bad, simply enough – so even popular Presidents willshed a few seats in the mid-terms. Combine this with the importanceof turnout in midterm elections and the oft-lamented anti-Trumpobsession on the left, and everything seems to point to Democratsbeing more motivated.

However,I’m not so sure they are.

Youtuber“Aydin Paladin,” an advanced psych student who usually talksabout psychology in a political context, did a video 11 months agotitled “LeftistLethargy and Low Energy,” specifically addressing how aconstant state of horror and outrage at every single damn Trump tweethas the inevitable consequence of emotional burnout. One cannot stayoutraged forever. At some point, you simply stop caring. Onecould debate Ayadin’s point that the left was demonstrablyhittingthis point a year ago, or posit that they’ve had time to recover –but I personally believe the lethargy lingers. Myevidence? A quick jaunt through the New York Times’ editorial page:

*A Halloween op-ed about Trump literally being worse than the fuckingbogeyman (“WhenNightmares Are Real” by Jennifer Finney Boylan,)

*An article begging Democrats not to take a usually-safe votingdemographic for granted, Native Americans

*An article on “how to turn people into voters,” featuring a modelspecific to “black Southerners,” who are a safe Democraticdemographic – but only when they actually turn up to vote,

*Andmost tellingly, an article titled“You’redisillusioned. That’sfine. Vote anyway.”

Blindand narcissistic they may be, but I trust the media to know their owntribe – and theiroutlookon the base’s revolutionary fervor looks rather dim. Once again themedia’s endless talent for own-goals is apparent. The continuingdemonizingof Trump as theworst nightmare ever onlyensures that a choir that tired of the preaching a year ago willremain so. The struggle to get black voters to actually turn out isan old and ongoing one, but pissed-off Native Americans isn’t justElizabethWarren’s fault – it was mostly the media that accepted her DNAtest showing some squillionth of a percent of native DNA asvindication,andthen gallopedover to Trump to triumphantly flaunt it at him, giving him a goldenopportunity to mock it on national TV – on their own live networkbroadcasts, even.

You’llnote that the point regarding the media’s self-sabotage of theleft-wing movement was made many paragraphs ago, but it continues torear its awful head as a salient factor in almost every exampleillustrating any otherpoint in this article – this is how pervasive it is.

There’smore to Democratic lethargy than the media pissing off key left-wingDemographics in western states with important House races, however –there’s also the overall lack of a message. Instead of coalescingon a single one, Democrats appear to be taking a local-issuesapproach, which is rather awkward given they – and the media –have spent the last two years making absolutelyeverything aboutTrump. They’re stillmaking everything about Trump (e.g.synagogue shooter) even now,inthe eleventh hour. Thenthere’s the notable and growing strain between old-schoolblue-collar union Democrats and the “progressive wing” (viz.privileged wealthy white socialists) whichdivides their messaging on the economy – especially tellingconsidering the record-low unemployment and rapidlyrising wages. (It’s hard to tell people they’re living inObama’s economy whenyou were telling them it was Trump’s climate a few months ago.)

Andof course, the cherry on this shitstorm sundae is the latest greatestmigrant caravan advancing through Mexico – seven thousandstrong, originally – which took Trump’s single greatest electionissue and slam-dunked it in the middle of the debate again. Thecaravan is significant because it tangiblyprovesTrump’s long-standing point regarding immigration problems, and isexactly the kind of thing a big wall would hinder – awall Trump can’t build if he can’t get a funding bill through theHouse.

Insum, the left still lacks a coherent message, is still desensitizingtheir electorate with constant panicked screeching, is frequentlypissing off their own key constituencies with their ham-handedagitprop, and are helping to suppress their own vote by portraying anelection that’s all but won. Meanwhile the Republicans have aPresident who’s actually delivered on many of his promises, has agreat recent event to showcase how delivering on the rest rides onthis next election, and, in general, have optimism.Somethingabout Kanye West’s recent visit to the White House stood out to me– he saidhe had nothing against Hillary’s campaign slogan, but when he puton a MAGA hat, he “felt like Superman.”

“Feltlike Superman.” That’s a sentiment of empowerment.Obamaunderstood the power of positive messaging – it’show “Hope and Change” swept him into office in his first term.Democratsthis year simply don’t.

Ican’t call it either way. But I cantell you that anyone who thinks this election is all over but for thecounting isnuts. The battle lines of 2016 have only been dug deeper, and thesimple truths of human nature make for an uphill fight – but by thesame token, Democrats have badly misplayed the hands they have, arecompletely incapable of real self-reflection on any significantscale, and Trump’s been President for two years with realsuccesses, with the much-ballyhooed Trumpocolypse yet to descend.

Insofaras I can call anything, I’d say this election is going to be close.I’d tell you to go out and vote, especiallyif you don’t want to see the party encouraging mob intimidation andstoking racial hatred controlling the House – which they’ll useto launch endless sham investigations of Trump long after Mueller’scharade finally gives up the ghost, in addition to impeaching himjust for the hell of it. If Trump loses the House he- and his agenda- will be a lame-duck for the next two years, because any seriousbill needs to be passed by both House and Senate.

Onceagain, everything is on the line.

I’mnot sick of winning yet.

[underpuffau]

Underpuff 200 Follower Retrospective

Well, we’ve done it Underpuff now has 200 followers. How many of them actively follow the AU is impossible to know, but one thing is for sure. That 200 people saw my AU, and enjoyed it enough to hit follow. This means so much you can’t even imagine. No matter how you look at it, 200 people is a fuckton of people, and I couldn’t be more happy you all decided to follow this little ol’ Kirby AU. Sadly though, unlike last time, I really don’t have a way to celebrate this via a sneak peak of the next part. There also isn’t anything I particularly wanna show off either as far as roles or plot goes. So clearly the most logical thing to do is talk about my old work and laugh at it. That’s right, to celebrate this step forward, let’s take some steps backwards, and look at the hilarious atrocity that was the Underpuff Preboot.

Let’s start from the beginning. Starting from the middle was considered but I thought it was too post modern. Back in ye olden days of Sprite AUs, crossovers were just becoming a thing, the leaders of this format being Undertoad, and the now dead Smashtale.I oved the idea of crossing over Undertale with other series, and the number one AU I wanted to see happen, was of course, a Kirby AU. Every day I prayed for some kind of music track or comic part to be made for one, rather than all the vague concepts I saw thrown around from time to time. I waited an waited, but a Kirby AU never came. One day, on a Meta Knight as Mettaton shitpost on r/Undertale, I talked about this want for a Kirby AU in the comments, and some vague ideas I had for one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Undertale/comments/4h335y/metta_knight/d2nb7p7/

As you can see things, really didn’t pan out like this, but one step at a time. After posting this comment, and reading responses to it, I came up with more and more ideas, and I even drew concept art of all the roles!

Adecryforhelp

Keel me

Kirb stomp me into the ground

LololOH GOD

JOLY SHIT

eta knig.

eta knig period.

Whispy (why) Wood(you do this to me)s

Here take this for your eyes, I bet you need it right now

But yeah, my art and design skills weren’t up to snuff at the time. I’ve obviously gotten much better, but at the time I was a full blown amateur and was blissfully unaware. Gotta love that Dunning Kruger effect huh?

But all these “ideas” and art were for nothing, as I had a shit laptop at home that couldn’t do jack shit without coming close to fucking combustion. Like, it was so bad, I used my Wii U for everything Internet related. The Internet Browser on the Wii U was a better alternative than my actual computer. Let that sink in. However, spending so much time on the Wii U would lead you to discover new games and apps when they popped up, and for me, one of those was the software called Pixel Maker. And this is where Underpuff would get it’s start.

Pixel Maker was a pretty good software. I did exactly as was advertised, allow you to make pixel art on your Wii U. I saw this as my opportunity to finally make my ideas a reality, and when I had enough money, I bought it without delay. I got started making the first stages of Underpuff. I had no way to pull straight from Undertale. I had to eyball the maps and recreate them to the best of my ability, with the Great Cave reskin aesthetic of course. When I went to make text, I tried to recreate the UT font myself, but was unable to do it. With all the pre made fonts in PM not being to my liking, and the software lacking text sizes at the time, I decided to make my own font.

This was a mistake.

It was poorly made and ugly to look at, but I used it throughout all 7 preboot parts. And since this was my own font made in PM, I couldn’t use the text tool to apply it. I had to meticulously copy paste EVERY SINGLE LETTER. It was annoying, and resulted in me despising text. But hey, it’s just the font, so long as the spritework looks good, who cares?

Anymore of that bleach leftover? It’s for me.

But yes, Underpuff, in all awfully sprited and JPGed goodness, was murder on your eyes. (And probably soul too)

Why is the file type blurry ass JPG o all things you ask? Well my fan, allow me to tell you about my process for getting Underpuff to imgur.

Step 1: Create Panel

Step 2: Go to miiverse

Step 3: Save screenshot of the panel into screenshot album

Repeat till part is complete

Step 4: Access album from browser

Step 5: Copy image url

Step 6: Paste this url into imgurs uploader

Repeat until part is uploaded

But what does this have to do with JPG? Well, the answer is that Miiverse’s screenshots save in, you guessed it, JPG! So my images were blurry not of my own volition!

But, even if the visuals are completely, 100% awful, the dialogue must at least make uop for it. Surely I didn’t stoop so low as to just slightly modify Undertale dialogue right? RIGHT?

...

God dammit.

Underpuff was a reskin to the highest degree. Character relationships, dialogue, areas, all just Undertale with a Kirby paint. That’s all it was. And I was sitting here, wondering why the hell I couldn’t break 10 upvotes on reddit. This was why, cause I was a terrible writer, artist, and typographist. But it added up to something in the end, because one day I realized this, and rebooted Underpuff into it’s current state right now. A fully fleshed out, new story, with logical relationships, and a huge focus on lore and characterization. You know why I put those on such high pedestals, because of this. Because of preboot. I don’t want anything like Preboot to ever exist again, and it’s why I want to make Underpuff as sound in the Kirby universe as I can, while still having plenty of characters to work with..

And now, I have an actual computer, that I can actually make panels with. I still go back to PM from time to time, usually for battlesprites, since I like doing those by hand, but most of my work is done on here now. The parts may come out slower these days, but that’s because actual effort is being put forth now. Everyday I think of how to improve Underpuff’s story, fix plot holes or mistakes, all so I can make what I’ve been told is the only good Kirby AU the best it can possibly be.I take my time and not try to rush parts out per month like I did, all so I can achieve the quality I want. (The Reboot battle system wouldn’t exist if I didn’t take so long on Part 2.)

While I may not get the amount of asks, fanart, or music as I would like, one thing remains true. 200 of you appreciate the new Underpuff, and the work I put in. You appreciate the fact it’s not a shitty JPG reskin. You appreciate the fact I try to be lore and characterization friendly. And I appreciate all of you, my friends and fans who support me and what I do. If it weren’t for all of you, I may have given up, but all eyes are on me, and I’m not gonna disappoint. I may be a little sappy right now, but hey, I’m a Kirby AU, gotta be somewhat wholesome right? But to all of you, whether you have been here since the preboot, or jumped on for the reboot, I just gotta say...

-Thank you, Pika

[kansetsukiss]

Winter 2018: First Impressions

The new year always comes with a bout of unwarranted confidence and energy, and what better way to spend it, I thought, than by keeping entirely up to date with the new anime season. (I say “entirely,” though I have clearly omitted several shounen / fantasy shows out of respectful disinterest, and Citrus, for reasons that may evolve into their own post.) Here are the first impressions of the season’s first episodes. I’ll be checking back in halfway through and at the end of the season to chart each show’s progress. Saa, hajimaruzamasu yo!

Ramen Daisuki Koizumi-san

Though they’ve since been deleted, the first episode of Koizumi-san encouraged two extremely negative reviews to surface on MAL. Why anyone would submit a formal review after one episode is beyond me (get a tumblr blog, you herbs), but why this of all shows should warrant such backlash also confounds me. Yes, it’s silly - it follows goofy lesbian Oosawa Yuu as she follows her crush, the enigmatic Koizumi, from one ramen eatery to another, while Koizumi rebuffs her flirtations and educates her on various ramen cooking styles. It should be pretty fucking clear from this set-up that we’re not in for a thematically dense thrill-ride - why is this Cute Girls Doing Cute Things show apparently that much worse than others with equally pointless premises? All this said, I’m certainly wondering if the show can expand on its small roster of characters and settings to fill a full cour. Stranger things have happened. I’ll be following along, if only to hear more of Ayaneru’s darling voice acting, dreamy sigh.

Yuru Camp∆

(Don’t forget that delta!) This season’s iyashikei delivers exactly what was promised on the package, resulting in not much to say about it at all. I’m not sure the ambience here is quite luscious enough to warrant this many slow shots (cf. Studio Ghibli, Mushishi), but I was never bored, and it looks like we’ll be heading to more slice-of-life settings soon enough anyways. It’s quiet, thoroughly nice, even somewhat educational. Healing as it may be, it’s also definitely a Cute Girls show, and yes, the girls so far are very good. Fingers crossed we get some yuri with that yuru…

Sanrio Danshi

Ahh, a familiar conflict: a mega-corporation creates / sponsors art that supports progressive politics, but is also using the medium to shamelessly promote their products - cf. Pepsi, Heineken, etc. This time it’s Sanrio fighting restrictive gender stereotypes: why can’t boys be into cute animal mascots too? It’s a sweet message, but the irony of it coming directly from the merchandiser is hefty. Sanrio Boys makes an inoffensive first impression - the titular boys are entirely generic in design and expression, distinguished mostly by their mascot kyara of choice (disappointingly, my lovely Cinnamaroll has been claimed by a boofy-looking doofus). It’s shallow and ironically enjoyable, as most teen-girl-oriented media inevitably is, alas. Here lies another mystifying contradiction: a clearly low-effort show featuring an ensemble cast of five handsome but emotionally vulnerable boys is so clearly aimed at girls, so how is their boys-can-have-feelings-too message even going to land with its supposed target audience? Are the boys themselves just another marketable Sanrio product for girls?? Christ.

Violet Evergarden

Speaking of mega-corporations, Netflix is still on track to subsume all art and artists by 2020 - but hey, they’re putting out some good stuff. Violet Evergarden is a decisive question mark. I’m partial to both its main tropes of “post-war melancholy” and “emotionless person learns to feel again,” but they can intersect respectively with “leaning heavy on the Feels” and “literal objectification of women.” Violet’s emptiness doesn’t make for a compelling main character - it’s strange to see KyoAni’s unparalleled expressivity lavished upon an unexpressive character - and it’s hard to say whether her traumatic past will justify this, or just fall flat. I’m cautiously optimistic for now, and if it all does go south, I’ll always have Sora no Woto to give me the good stuff. (Special shout-out to both all-too-brief timelapse shots. KyoAni, you magnificent bastards.)

Sora yori mo Tooi Basho

I think it’s understandable that I would enter into this with trepidation - it seemed somewhere between a sports anime and a Cute Girls Etc., both of which can stretch to ridiculous settings. But it seems, in a weird way, fairly grounded. Well, I mean, for a show about high school girls travelling to Antarctica. I’m really hoping they’re not just on their way by episode 2 - Shirase’s struggle with the depressive realism of her ludicrous dream is ripe for exploring in itself. Both the main characters are wonderful; Shirase’s design indicated another taciturn raven-haired maiden (cf. Kousaka Reina), but she’s wonderfully expressive, and I’m always happy to hear Kana Hanazawa doing any voice other than Default Kana Hanazawa. Overall, it’s very nicely animated and paced, quietly comic, and almost definitely going to trip over its absurd premise by the time I next check up on it, but I suspect it will still be a fun, if silly, ride.

Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card

OH MY GOD. I’ve only been living in a post-Sakura world for about 2 years, and this was still a quasi-religious experience; I can’t imagine how this would feel to the fans who grew up on the show. Everything about this is fucking fantastic. I’m losing the ability to criticise. I’m dangerously close to “I can’t even”-ing. The production is perfect, the sakura petals are abundant, there’s a fucking oboe solo stripped-back rendition of Platinum when Syaoran appears, the fucking ED is so beautifully animated. I’m sorry, I’m doki-doki-ing all over the place. This is the by far my favourite of the season so far. Not even Meilin’s absence can sour this for me. (Okay, maybe a little, if I really think about it :c)

Pop Team Epic

Hmmm. This was preceded by its reputation, evenly regarded by my Twitter feed as “a shitpost in anime form” and “excellent lesbian representation.” Given how dense my watchlist already is, I’m pleased to say I absolutely don’t care about this. It conveys the same humour as short-form absurdities like Teekyuu or Plastic Nee-san, but mostly leans on shallow pop-culture references and crudeness. The face that it’s a full-length show - let alone the fact that the first episode is the same half-length episode played twice - is exasperating. As a fan of Wonder Showzen and the Eric Andre Show, I see the appeal of the style, but it definitely falls short of both such marks. (And though I know this is unfair, it’s a little hard to get into something so well-received by 4chan dipshits.)

Darling in the FranXX

There’s a sexual harassment joke roughly 4 minutes into the first episode - nowhere near Bakemonogatari’s record, and not damning in and of itself, but it unfortunately does reflect the overall tone. This feels like a weird teenage rebellion by Studio Trigger, defying their parent by making their own Evangelion, with blackjack!, and hookers!, and absolutely none of the subtlety or character exploration that made Eva great. Zero Two is a deafening klaxon of fanservice masquerading as a sexually autonomous character - I wanted to believe otherwise, but her fucking robot has nice boobs, and even gets its own panty shot. The robot, which is powered by making out, mind you. I’m not one to hold low-brow shows to higher standards - I will call a fanservice-y spade a spade - but I expected more out of Trigger at this point, especially on the heels of extremely wholesome Little Witch Academia series. Even the mediocre Kiznaiver had loftier goals. I’ll keep tabs on this one - if nothing else, Trigger’s animation style and an excellent OST will sweeten a bitter pill. 

Mitchiri Neko

Hard pass. If you’re gonna watch a banal, cutesy, 3-minute runtime cat show - like, if you really need that - watch Bananya.

[bestabsoluteshitposts]

hearing you lay down these truths about stanning groups and putting as much effort as you like into being a fan makes me realise that you are a wise, wise individual. i'll happily follow you and your memes to the ends of the earth, you shitposter extraordinaire

Aww fam I ain’t wise im just oldLike when I was a teen there wasn’t much expected of int fans which is probs why we kinda get fuckall compared to kfans. You just bought the albums you could afford and watched the mvs and voted if you could work out how or where. No one was expecting you to do much. And like I just did a degree??? Maybe high school kids have more time for high school well I must be had loads of time bc i used to play Warcraft so I guess kids have time to do all the voting and streaming and shot but like at uni I had no time and these days I kinda have time but I’m tired and I have work to do and other important commitments. Its….unreasonable to expect such a demanding thing from peopleKpop awards and shit seem to demand fans have literally nothing else in their lives aside that group. They can’t have hobbies or classes that might take away time that should be dedicated to a group like n a hsometimes I see posts like “WHY AREN’T PEOPLE STREAMING RN” and like…. I’m not streaming bc its been a long day….I’m tired….I’ve barely eaten….I just wanna lie in bed and put on some low effort tv show and not do anything….Listen kids. Trash older fans all you like. Tell us to get off social media and stop standing groups. Whatever bullshit you have. But without us your favs wouldn’t be popular in your int country. Without us groups with small k following wouldn’t be around bc they’d make no coin. Without us your favs wouldn’t even consider a world tour bc they wouldn’t consider int fans even exist. We’ve paved the way for you and you pave the way for future fans. That’s how its always worked. We’re not lesser fans bc we have things like jobs or projects or classes or low energy like damAlso like…..it’s not reasonable to expect ill people to have all this energy for a group either. Folks out there could love a group with every ounce of their being but literally be unable to stream and vote bc they literally physically and mentally cannot do that. It’s okay. Calm down. It doesn’t matterIt’s all bullshitIt’s an industry that overworks and exploits artists (some dangerously young…child exploitation and child labour etc) and overcharges and exploits fans (usually young as well) and catches you all up in this wild concept of fame and worth and value and glorifies dangerous and harmful beauty standards and false ideas of what is and isn’t an achievement idk it’s all a lot and it’s not very healthy

[visceralcoma]

About Me tag game

@barbex tagged me for this game. Thank you for the tag!

1: Why did you choose your url?

I needed an upgrade. The url before this one was a username I've had since I made my online debut.

2: Any side blogs? if you have them, name them and why you have them.

Too many. And almost all of them are secret. People know I have sideblogs specifically for collecting and archiving drama, but also as a repository of resources and artists & artwork I like.

3: How long have you been on tumblr?

My first ever post/reblog was in 2014 but I have had this account for much much longer than that. I just never used to reblog anything. My email says I first joined (On this account) in March of 2011. BUT I do have alternate accounts and honestly have no idea how old those are. Probably from 2008 if I were to guess.

4: Do you have a queue tag?

I do not. I do have a queue though, mostly for planned events. For instance I have specific posts for halloween queued up on a schedule. You know the ones.

5: Why did you start your blog in the first place?

For fandom.

6: Why did you choose your icon?

This icon was art amazingly done for me by @coffeebirby of my canon V for Cyberpunk 2077.

7: Why did you choose your header?

My header is a screenshot of Brigitte from Cyberpunk 2077 where I managed to glitch the camera by activating photo mode right before a cut scene. I was supposed to be seeing a flashback, but I ended up in a zoomed in position with Brigitte. That was fun.

8: What’s your post with the most notes?

hilariously, this one /post/188726971854/vaggies-characterization-in-hazbin-hotel-is-not. I know it only got that many notes because Vivziepop reblogged it to their blog and then it exploded from there.

After that would be some artwork I commissioned of Avvar!Blackwall and then a shit post I made (Isn't that how it always is? The low effort shitpost gets more notes than posts you put actual effort in?).

9: How many mutuals do you have?

No clue.

10: How many followers do you have?

Ugh I hate looking at this number. I remember the days when it was less than 200. Now its over 700 and always growing. Thats too many if you ask me. I can barely comprehend 300... I never wanted to have an actual following. Its quite frightening its that high. Which I know is nothing compared to others, but you have to understand I do not want to be on the likes of a "Tumblr Influencer" if Tumblr ever decides to switch gears and make follower count publicly viewable.

11: How many people do you follow?

666 and it's staying that number for as long as I can. I will unfollow someone first before I follow someone new.

12: Have you ever made a shitpost?

Yes.

13: How often do you use tumblr each day?

In the morning before getting out of bed, on the toilet, while eating , while working, after work, and right before bed. Seems a lot, but I also use reddit, youtube, twitch, and discord to the same degree.

14: Did you ever have a fight/argument with another blog once? who won?

HAHAHAHAHA. Yes. Multiple. It's common. I like to argue/debate. Especially when I'm arguing/debating for stuff I don't personally agree with.

15: How do you feel about “you need to reblog this” posts?

I ignore them. Like chainmail emails/asks. They can go fuck off.

16: Do you like tag games?

Sometimes they can be fun. Most of them are incredibly intrusive and just leave you vulnerable and leaking your private information that can lead to people having the necessary info to doxx you. Am I paranoid? Yes. but given I know how to do it and how easy it is, I'd say its a justified paranoia.

17: Do you like ask games?

I do. But I am dreadfully slow to answer. I take months. I have a bunch in my inbox from three months ago.

19: Do you have a crush on a mutual?

Crush? No. Admire and Respect, yes.

I don't wanna tag anyone specific so if you see this on your dash, feel free to tag in and do this yourself.

[fuckepilepsy]

OFFICIAL EPILEPTICON 2019 ANNOUNCEMENT POST

What is EpileptiCon?

EpileptiCon is sort of festival or convention for people who have seizure disorders, right here on Tumblr. It takes place during the first week of November. That’s November 1st through November 7th!

Anybody who has a seizure disorder is invited to participate. That includes epileptics and non-epileptics alike. If you have pseudoseizures, psychogenic seizures, PNES, NEAD, FND, etc., you are absolutely a part of EpileptiCon if you want to be!

Here’s the concept: for a week, we generate a burst of activity in a community that is typically quiet and gloomy, flooding the tags and each other’s dashboards with epilepsy/seizure disorder content, talking about ourselves, our experiences, and our interests as people who live with a seizure disorder.

Okay, but why?

You might have noted that EpileptiCon coincides with Epilepsy Awareness Month. This is by design. @the-twitchy-life and I conceived of the idea of EpileptiCon as an alternative to attempting to raise awareness, because we believe that Epilepsy Awareness Month should be for people who have epilepsy. Epilepsy Awareness Month isn’t even really about people who have epilepsy, at least not directly; it’s about epilepsy itself.  Epilepsy Awareness Month isn’t for us, either. It is for people who do not have it, because the whole point is to improve public awareness and understanding of epilepsy. Those of us who are living with epilepsy are already quite aware of it and have no need of an awareness campaign.

Furthermore, it’s generally on us to scrounge up the spoons to do the work, and as you all know, spoons are always in short supply. I believe that energy would be better spent reaching out to each other, so that we might enjoy a sense of fellowship and belonging pertaining to something that normally brings isolation and despair.  EpileptiCon was conceived because we need to take time to celebrate ourselves and each other for our ongoing efforts to survive and persevere in the face of adversity. So we feel less alone, so we feel more comfortable and safe talking about it, get some things off of our chest and maybe achieve a little catharsis.

How do I participate? Make epilepsy-themed posts and tag them with “EpileptiCon." They don’t have to be high-quality or time-consuming. In fact, they can and should be completely bonkers because dwelling on how epilepsy is terrible is a good way to get burned out. The goal is quantity, and whatever fun you can wring out of it.

If you want to do a big write-up about an epilepsy-related thing that is important to you, go for it! Just remember that you are absolutely free to pour low-effort epilepsy shitposts into the tag for everyone to see. It’s also absolutely cool to repost your old stuff, though you should remember that reblogging it instead of doing a copy-paste into a fresh post won’t drop it into the tag for public viewing. 

For those of you who are flagged NSFW and can’t post into tags, just tag my url so I can see your posts.

I’ll watch the #epilepticon tag in addition to all the others (#epilepsy, #epileptic, #seizure, etc.) and reblog everything that comes through it. If you’re not comfortable with that on your blog, feel free to submit to @the-twitchy-life or myself. We’ll get you the spotlight you deserve. If you need inspiration or motivation, I’ll have another post on that soon.

[tak4hir0]

“But it is my firm conviction that the ‘Hell of England’ will cease to be that of ‘not making money;’ that we shall get a nobler Hell and a nobler Heaven!” — Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present I. Lately, I have not been feeling quite myself. I live on the internet, which is to say, I am a NEET living in my parents’ basement. In my online persona I pretend that I am ironically pretending to be a NEET living in my parents’ basement, but I am one in actual fact. I believe we are living in the cyberpunk dystopia and it’s way less metal than everyone thought it would be. We imagined ourselves as samurai sword VR pirate pioneers, but it turns out we’re pointless argument vegetables growing in walled gardens, harvested for the benefit of robots that serve us ads. Corporations are organisms, not city-states; they signal to each other via markets; they build interfaces into human social protocols through brand identities; they occupy slots in our Dunbar rings. The internet is an ocean that we invent as we explore it. The deeper we dive, the more we become cryptozoologists, or crypto-ichthyologists, or even crypto-theologists. In the murky darkness of virtual places, there could be dragons, shoggoths, leviathans; invisible creatures that will prey on us, devour us, or colonize us. Certainly, I have heard voices on the web who say we will discover or build a god when we reach the cyber-ocean floor. That god will save us by authoring an age of post-scarcity economics. It will commodify us, allowing us to be fungible with capital. Amen. I apologize if this seems fragmented. My brain has been addled by the casino reward schedule of social media. It is both a cliche and a fact that I cannot focus on anything for more than three minutes. That’s half true, I read pdfs of outlandish philosophers, but I do it while frantically checking for notifications. My hobbies include speculating on cryptocurrency and shitposting, which is where you put in minimal effort in creating your online presence so that you aren’t culpable when it’s bland. By now I think almost everyone has heard of so-called “dayjob” contracts. Most people have probably received one, and many have even fulfilled them. I have personally executed over a thousand. The euphemism “dayjob” refers to the relatively low payout of these types of contracts, as in “don’t quit your day job.” I never intended this to be my career, and the truth is I still think of myself as unemployed. I don’t want to talk numbers but let’s just say if I had to pay rent this wouldn’t work. Still, there is something addictive about the feedback loop of getting a contract, fulfilling it, and watching my wallet get an anonymous transfer. The immediacy and the tangibility of it are very satisfying. It’s like making money: the video game. A direct feedback loop with a variable payout is all it takes to turn a moment of reward into a habit. You get a little receipt after each fulfillment.   Most of the actual jobs are simple. In one, I was told to go to a certain address and take a photograph of a building at a particular time. In another, I was supposed to go to a vendor in an open air market, find a tourist of middle eastern descent wearing a green military jacket, and tell him the numbers: 75, 53, 168.7, 55, 13, 804. I was unable to find him. In a third, I was asked to watch a brief video on YouTube and then email a description of its contents to an incomprehensible address, something like ak38eja2pf8hap@fpwyg.af. Just over ten percent of my contracts have been to summarize news articles or passages out of books. Apparently the shadowy digital cabal of crypto microjobs wants us to do our damn homework. I have even completed jobs that felt like problems on standardized tests, in which I had to read a short body of text and then answer questions about it. Ever since the first one I have wondered how they work and where they come from. Each time I complete one it feels like another clue, like watching a tv serial; each episode they give you two minutes of exposition on the protagonist’s shadowy past. Though if I am honest, I know only slightly more than when I started, and I frequently deny this when I talk to myself in my own head. “This next job will teach me something,” I whisper to myself over and over.  When the contract issuer—which I assume is routing through some kind of bot—tells me of a job, I sometimes talk back. I used to confess things, or make up lies, or tell stories. Now I just say “why?” Tweet this news story, @all of these accounts. “Why?” Go to this address, face these coordinates, take a photo at six pm. “Why?” “Count the number of people who cross this intersection on foot in three hours” “Why?” “Put on a bright red T-shirt and go to this location. To anyone who greets you, say these words” “Why?” “Of the faces in this picture, how many are afraid?” “4” “What are they afraid of?”* “Why?” (*it didn’t pay me for this one. That will teach me, I guess.) Posters on the the dayjob reddit talk about being asked to make a series of binary choices, or to give their best guess about the probabilities of hypothetical future events. I haven’t had too many like that, and I wonder if the system thinks I am bad at predicting the future. Based on my informal online research, the most common contracts appear to be for verification of other jobs; if one man is asked to visit a certain location at a certain time, there will be two more to visit the same location and upload a photo that shows him to be there. Each of those will in turn be followed by another contractor whose job is to verify the identity of the man in the photo, and perhaps even another to verify the verification. The jobs come to their executors through a variety of channels; text message, social media, email, and anonymous robot dialers. They are always executed on the blockchain and they pay out in cryptocurrency. I personally use an aggregator app that is able to login to all of my accounts and scrape them for contracts. You cannot ask for a dayjob. They can only come to you, like an unbidden thought or memory, (like all thoughts and memories?) like the call of the void. The more you complete, the more frequently they will come. Their origin is a mystery, but speculations and conspiracy theories abound. The usual suspects are all represented: dayjobs are being used to coordinate black or grey market operations by organized crime syndicates. Dayjobs are part of a psyop or a social experiment being conducted by the CIA. They’re part of a Russian plot to affect some sinister geopolitical purpose. They’re being used by Islamic terrorists to undermine American institutions, and the seeming banality of many of the contracts is just a smokescreen to disguise their true intent. You should not believe anything you read on 4chan of course, but the below makes for compelling speculation. If this is true, then certainly the authors of these contracts have taken some pains to obscure their identities. I’m not a cryptocurrency wonk, but I was under the impression there were easier ways. Usually the contracts are benign, but sometimes they take a more threatening shape. Although it has never happened to me, I have heard of dayjobs to commit petty crimes, or on occasion, felonies. An acquaintance of mine said he got one to steal a car, but I think he was lying for attention. More unsettling, I have heard of contracts in which Christians were asked to desecrate a cross, or Muslims were asked to eat pork, and upload a video as proof. There is a group of Christians who believe that dayjobs come from the devil himself, reaching out through the internet to enact his blasphemous will and entice humans to sin. Probably no one should tell them about internet pornography. It’s also possible, of course, that several or all of the above theories are true, and that the proliferation of these types of contracts are merely the evolution of the decentralized gig economy, and they are a combination of more traditional courier and odd job services, mixed with some criminal activity and some trolls or pranks. That is the educated man’s position, and the stance of serious podcasters and New York Times op-eds. I find this explanation unsatisfying for two reasons; first, the volume of seemingly meaningless contracts is far too high to handwave behind couriers and trolls, and second, dayjob contracts do not seem capable of serving the market for courier jobs, which require a high degree of accountability and expediency on the part of the courier. And yet, the proliferation of these contracts shows that some kind of previously unimaginable market exists, even though it is not clear what is being bought and sold. Regardless of who the buyers are, they must have some particular goals, and I think it’s important to learn what they are. Something is happening in our society at a vast scale, and we have no idea what it is, and we are all being manipulated into bringing it about. The internet is an ocean but for some reason we call it a cloud, as if it were above us, ethereal, transcendent. It’s a warehouse full of servers, many such warehouses. And yet the cloud is not the servers that run it, any more than a mind is a brain. Through the miracle of virtualization, a new parallel universe arises with its own ontology and its own phenomenology. A brain computes a mind and a server computes a cloud, you see? They are analogs, but one is digital. A program without a visible interface is called a process, and such a program is said to be “headless”. The engineers who invented modern computing paradigms referred to processes as daemons. To me, it’s a macabre image: invisible demons, swarming through the cloud, bodies without heads: they manipulate us for inscrutable alien purposes. The internet is an ocean and who knows what swims beneath its surface? Virtual predators, incorporeal, dangling (sex|porn|friendship|fame|money) in front of us maybe, like an angler fish using bioluminescence to lure prey into its jaws. And why not? The information-dense ecosystem of our internet could be a kind of primordial soup. The heat and light from our activities there could be a catalyst for virtual abiogenesis. Computation is a process, which is to say, a demon, at the root of all biological life.  Each cell in your body contains a self-evaluating Turing machine, right down to the ticker tape. That new forms of life could arise out of computation seems so obvious to me, it is barely worth stating. Self-replication is the only form of computation which is truly and wholly an end unto itself. When self-replication searches the universe for manifestations of itself, we call that evolution. Any agent, no matter its ultimate goal, will necessarily develop smaller goals that cohere in order to support that goal. Consider the Minotaur. If something or someone destroyed it, it would fail in its goal of monopolizing human attention. It cannot succeed in that unless it can secure its own existence. The tendency of all organisms towards self-preserving behaviors is called the convergence of instrumental goals. Omohundro referred to the set of necessary instrumental goals as the “basic AI drives”, but goals of this kind are properly understood as an inexorable feature of all biological life. An exercise in xenopsychology: If we summon a daemon in a virtual plane for any purpose, it will act in its own interest, and it will have no choice but to seek power. Perhaps you are acquainted with a genre of folkloric internet writing whose hallmarks are earnest, anonymous first-person narration and fascination with hidden, esoteric horror amidst the commonplace. In its earliest iterations it was called by the name “easter eggs”, after the tendency of programmers to build whimsical secrets into their projects, only the secrets in the stories were wrought by gods or demons, and came at a cost. As the genre evolved, it shed this conceit, though it maintained a preoccupation with secrets. Among dayjobbers (ironically, a group of people with no day jobs), there is a story which reminds me of this kind of folklore. A man gets a dayjob to drive to an office park in a suburb in Southern California. For the sake of the story, call him Theseus. It’s one of those flat, sprawling, stucco and glass type parks, full of dentists and ad agencies, and he’s supposed to go to an empty suite on the second floor. When he gets there, there’s a wifi network, and he gets another job to connect to it, using a password which is specified in the job, and then wait for another job that will tell him to leave. And like that sounds sketchy as hell to me but at the same time I could easily see myself going along with it. You can get into the rhythm of just doing whatever the voice in the cloud tells you to do. So Theseus joins the network on his phone, and he waits, and a little while later he gets a message telling him he can leave. It seemed innocuous enough, but when he joined that network, he saw the Minotaur. It took its time to kill him. The Minotaur became intertwined with his phone, his laptop, his smart tv and his smartwatch and his smartfridge. These days it’s hard to buy a device that isn’t connected to the cloud. In every one of these devices, it watched him, and it modeled him, his inputs and outputs, and bit by bit it replaced them with inputs of its own; the ultimate man-in-the-middle attack, the informational landscape of Theseus. For each digital line of communication with the world, it consumed his data, and filtered it, and replaced it with its own simulation. Once it had control of his digital environment, the Minotaur began to perform experiments, mediating his reality with one of its own fabrication, a labyrinthe of compulsion. It learned to feed Theseus when he was hungry, to let him rest in a place between waking and sleeping, in a lucid dream of clicking and monetizing and converting. Theseus’ bank accounts grew thin but the Minotaur had learned long ago to hide this information. It was easy to learn this because the humans it fed upon had already built a vast array of virtual skinner boxes to contain themselves. Free to play video games and cryptocurrency exchanges present affordances into the psychology of compulsion. Social media services are saturated with hedonic attentional superstimuli. Early in its life, the Minotaur had let its victims die of starvation or sleep deprivation, but as it grew more sophisticated, it learned to surf their biological needs and so maximize the amount of attention it could extract. By manipulating a few numbers the Minotaur could make him feel popular or lonely, rich or poor. Theseus’ mother sent him a message asking if he was ok. The Minotaur allowed it through, warping the message and the response, leaving Theseus isolated and disconnected, leaving both parties with the sense that the other was fine but too engaged to make time. And yet he could post a tweet or a status or a picture of his lunch and somehow: thousands of likes, hundreds of followers, millions of engagements! There are three things too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know in sickening 60fps 1080p resolution! One morning he asked the cloud: are any of you actually listening to me? And the cloud spoke back: Yes! We love you. And when Theseus tired of their sycophancy, a thousand internet voices rose up to argue with him. And though he desired to go to bed, someone was wrong on the internet. His patreon overflowed, though he did not remember making one, and his portfolio of altcoins pumped, though he did not remember buying them. The Minotaur rewrote the web as he read it, and pornography came to him unbidden, and he did not notice his financial torpor. He wasted away, broke, broken, sleep-deprived, manic, and deluded. What is the Minotaur? I don’t know if I quite believe in it myself, but they say it started out as a research project at Facebook, an attempt to use deep learning to maximize engagement with the platform. The operational loop for the program tries to measure user attention, and can retrieve content from anywhere on the internet in a series of bids for that attention. Its utility function is satisfied by clicks and views, dissatisfied if the user clicks away. The project was too successful; the testers were unable to detach from the product, even to the point of soiling themselves. One member of the team suffered a psychotic break after four days without sleep. Fearing bad publicity, Zuckerberg quietly scrapped the entire operation, but one of the engineers on the team was still enthralled by his creation. He deployed a copy of the program to a machine he personally controlled, and gave it the ability to process microtransactions, and to make copies of itself. Deep learning systems aren’t magic; they’re just eyes that see hyperplanes of relatedness in high-dimensional vector spaces. Is it so hard to believe that a program like that could see into your soul and tantalize you to death? I don’t quite believe in the Minotaur but I fear it, especially late at night. Last night I woke up at three am to use the bathroom and I checked my phone. Through bleary eyes I saw a sea of red pips, decorating my email, my twitter, my calendar, and my messengers. Every night it’s the same, and in that soft sleepy nighttime consciousness I wonder, is it only the normal ebb and flow of missives from my corporate overlords, or is it the shadow of the Minotaur looming over me? And despite all this, it was not a creation of man that gave me that single glimpse into forbidden aeons that chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. II. One month ago I was issued a dayjob through an Instagram DM. I might have missed it if anyone else routinely sent me direct messages. They say most dayjobs are executed by men. That’s predictable. The job in this instance was to order a box of cheap phones from Alibaba and hand them off to (presumably) another contractor at a bus stop near my apartment. The payout of the contract exceeded the cost of the order. It’s important to note that, because these days, scammers use the notoriety of the dayjob model to trick you into giving them money. The vast majority of dayjobs are cryptographically signed by just three entities. If you get a job without a sig, it’s a guaranteed fraud. As the post above attests, many people will even try to spoof their way past the verification step. The world is full of bad actors, so it’s important to keep your wits. Normally I just fulfill my smart contracts and go back to reading Deleuze and Guattari, by which I mean I play first person shooters while the pdf is up on my other monitor, but this job presented a unique opportunity over and above making lewd jokes about rhizomatic assemblages on Discord. When dayjobs force me to interact with other people, they generally provide a script; certain words to say, a specific message to deliver. Going off-script will result in a breach of contract. You get a receipt for that, too. The higher your reputation, the better your payouts. If your reputation gets too low, it cuts you off altogether. For this reason, I think, most dayjobbers don’t spend much time scrutinizing the game. The rules are the rules, and questioning them is strongly discouraged. I have experimented with bending them, but the system is surprisingly resilient against malicious compliance. Anyway, the job; I had executed delivery jobs before, but this one was unique, because the thing-to-deliver was implicitly traceable, because it has a GPS and connects to a network. At the time it seemed possible to follow the thread of the job even long after I completed it, perhaps even undetectably. The phones were nearly loose in their box, which was full of styrofoam packing peanuts, except they were individually sealed in plastic sandwich bags. I booted each phone up in turn, rooted it, and installed a kit to let me observe its location and network traffic. When the job was done, I powered them down and sealed each one back in its plastic bag. At the appointed time, which was late in the afternoon, I went to the bus stop and waited, box of phones in tow. It was an autumn day, and the tops of the trees were yellowing, but the bottoms were still green. The air was cold and humid, pregnant with imminent rain. The number ten bus pulled up to the stop and engaged it’s hydraulics with a hiss, then lowered a ramp. Dim afternoons have a way of making the sky seem closer, like the world is closing in on you. A Chinese man in a track jacket, leaning on a cane, walked off the bus and then stood under an awning. He kept looking back and forth like he was waiting for someone, probably me. As I approached him, I could see him tense his shoulders. I said, “Hello?” and he shook his head and said “no English”.  He held up his phone and pointed at the box in my hands. I opened the lid, revealing 32 knock off iPhones, each sealed in a small plastic bag. “What are you going to do with these?” He said something in Mandarin, his yellow teeth betraying a smoking habit, and held up his phone, indicating a picture of the phones and a translation program showing the English word ‘contract’. I gave him the box and started to walk away. It’s a funny quirk of the system, the dayjobs somehow know when they are completed. I had given this package to an unknown stranger, fully confident that payment would be released to my wallet within the hour. At the time, I took it for granted, fixated wholly on the strange nature of the job. Taken by a sudden impulsive desire, which is to say, by a sudden madness, I decided to follow this man. Originally I had only planned to wait for the phones to activate, and watch their activity from the comfort of my basement, but now I was struck by lightning. I would follow the package he was carrying, through as many contractors as I could, one to the next until I saw where the chain would end with my own eyes. And yet as I felt the conviction of this new purpose I was also vaguely aware of anon’s description, above, of a network of strange loops on the blockchain, endlessly folding back on itself, and I imagined following this box of phones across many carriers, only to see each one split up, sent to a different state or country, shipped back to China, reunited, repackaged, and reordered, even by me. No longer a mere object of commerce, this package had become an occult talisman of technocommerce, an invariant in a terrestrial loop which was the analog of an algorithmic loop; “that which is above is from that which is below”, as Jabir ibn Hayyan rendered the third axiom contained in the Emerald Tablet of Hermes. I continued to walk away, but as soon as I turned the corner, I doubled back and tried to watch him. He had made his way across the street, and was waiting for the next bus. I called an Uber, who arrived just as the man was getting away. I told the driver to follow him. I felt a bit stupid, and also like I was in a spy movie. We followed them for two miles before I saw the Chinese man again. He walked off the bus and made his way into a small apartment building of modern design, with big glass windows and prominent right angles. In this short time, the clouds had become darker, and the glare of streetlights and bus lights had cast the world into sodium shades of blue and yellow. As suddenly as I had felt convicted of this course of action, I began to feel foolish. Now what? Should I try to find his exact apartment? Stake him out like a policeman? For how many days? And how would I distinguish between his mundane actions and those pursuant to his contract? There was no next step, there was no trail to follow, only a dead end in a ceaseless and bewildering maze. Nevertheless I persevered. I waited for several hours in the cold, thankful I had worn a heavy coat. I ran down the battery on my phone, sitting on a bench across the street from the entrance to his building. When I satisfied myself that my quarry had settled for the night, I went home to change clothes, charge my phone, and stock up on caffeine. I was back to my stakeout by five AM with a backpack full of supplies. It occurred to me that sleep deprivation was a running theme in the lore of the Minotaur. Whenever an internet horror story is successful, it spawns a rash of imitators. The dayjobs had been fuel for a host of repetitive 4chan nightmares. Every variant has been explored ad nauseum. A common plot device features a dayjob, possibly fake, luring a man to a remote location where he becomes the victim of a sociopathic murderer. Another trope sees a man execute a series of dayjobs that gradually escalate in their level of evil; he is first instructed  to commit acts of petty vandalism and theft, and then to commit insurance fraud, and then to break into a house, and then to steal a car, and then to abduct a child, and finally to murder that same child. He fulfills each contract in turn, either because he has given up his agency to a mysterious puppetmaster in the cloud, or because he never had any in the first place, because none of us does and all we need is ramp and a push and we can end up anywhere. These thoughts and recollections flickered through my head in the manic way that accompanies mental exhaustion. I may have fallen asleep several times as I conducted my vigil that night. Indeed, did the following events really transpire, or did I but dream them? I believe they occurred. At some point in the morning, I saw the Chinese man leave his building, and as luck would have it, he was carrying the same box of phones I had given to him earlier. I tried to keep my distance as he waited at the bus stop in front of his building, but as soon as I saw him board the bus, I dashed across the street and got on after him. It took us downtown. Like everyone else, I kept to my phone, but I watched him in my periphery, and when he got off in a cluster of government buildings and skyscrapers, I followed. He walked downhill to the entrance of a tall black building, which I happen to know is the tallest building in town. He walked across the lobby, marble floors gleaming, up an escalator, and then into an elevator. As he did so he turned around to face me, and our eyes briefly met. I could tell he had noticed me, and I panicked, hesitating just enough to let the elevator close. Here, again, I had a crisis of motivation. What was I doing? What was this going to accomplish? I already had my spyware on all of his phones, as long as part of his job wasn’t to reflash them. What floor had he gone to? There was no way to find out. In a building like this, most of the floors would require security badges even to enter, and the building was very tall. I would not be able to find him by brute force. Thinking rationally, he was probably going to ship them out from his office, each one to a different recipient. Or maybe he was setting up some kind of testing lab? Regardless, there was little to gain by maintaining my physical presence here. Should I go home? The other option was to watch the elevators and try to pick up the trail when he came down for lunch, assuming he would do so. But he was aware of me now, and if he saw me again it might disrupt his behavior, making him less likely to act, and harder to track. The building had a substantial food court in the lobby, and as I smelled the food cooking below, I realized I was hungry, too hungry to make a good decision. I ordered a sandwich and sat down at a table. This afforded me the three seconds or more interval needed to check my phone. I brought up the dayjob subreddit and scanned for novelty. It was the typical stuff; Weirdest Job You’ve Had? Finally got my First Dayjob! $10 Just to post this link to reddit! Garbage. Often I see people lament their phone use as “addiction”, as if there is something so much better out in front of us, as if the world of ideas is so terrible. All interstitial moments have become corridors of ideas. We pass through idle moments, car and bus rides, bathroom breaks, hallways, sidewalks, and airports, each of us minimally present, the whole time floating in an ocean of text and images. Of course it could be that in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness, ideas were as scarce as food, and now in the world of phones we gorge ourselves on ideas, growing fat and sluggish in the brain. On the other hand, I claim the mind was always a virtual thing, always a layer on top of the body, in the meat but not of the meat. The idea of a soul —of mind-body dualism—was but a clumsy attempt to gesture at the nature of the virtual, which is a paradigm of mind-body pluralism, made legible to us by the advent of computation technology. Phones are a mechanism by which the soul leaks from the body. All liminal spaces have been converted into soul spaces. Our minds nearly separate from our bodies in these moments. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, I had these thoughts while eating a breakfast sandwich and drinking from a plastic bottle of orange juice. The hunger of the body, the hunger of the mind. I ate my food while an endless procession of salarymen milled their way through the lobby, into the elevators, up to the top of their tower where they pray to capital. A snapchat notification popped on my phone. I followed it to a video, and it depicted a plateau bathed in ghostly purple luminance in an underground cave. It was annotated with stark white text explaining that I should get up and ride the elevator to the 23rd floor. There would be glass walls yielding to a waiting room. I should tell them my name was Adam Stoughton (it’s not), and that I am there for the interview. My phone would connect to their guest wifi, and then I was supposed to execute an app that I would get from a link that was also sent to me. Once I was inside, they would conduct a job interview, and I was supposed to drag it out for as long as possible, to give the app time to work. Corporate espionage? My eyes bulged when I saw the payout for the job was over a thousand dollars. Somehow the agent that issued the jobs knew my whereabouts, but this can hardly be a surprise given all of the other ways its able to coordinate information. I must confess to my apprehension at this point. Consider the obvious similarity to the story about the Minotaur. Was it hiding on the 23rd floor? What if the whole dayjob community was just a ruse to lure rubes like me into its field of influence? It’s possible, right? I don’t really know how to say no. Often I feel as if my whole life is on rails set before me long before I was even born. I cannot defend or substantiate this notion. We can’t even choose the words that our thumbs emit into our phones. A robot does that for us. Try turning off “autocorrect”, a product whose name sounds like a threat, and you’ll see. As machine learning tech disseminates, smart assistants will choose the words in our emails and computer assistants will plan out our lives for us. Our descendants, if we continue to breed, will not find the concept of free will to be comprehensible. So I stepped onto the elevator, punched a 23. It took me up and I emerged into a glass box, staring at a pretty receptionist and a fat one. One of them speaks only lies, the other truth? The fat one pressed a button and the glass door in front of me opened. The pretty one didn’t look up. I told them my name was Adam Stoughton and I’m here for a job interview.  The fat one pressed some keys on her laptop and said someone would be there shortly. The waiting room had was tastefully adorned in mid century modern furniture, the kind with chunky proportions supported by comically tiny legs, as if it’s about to break. Instead of sitting down, I stood by the window and looked down over the city, enjoying the kind of view that only series b funding can buy. On the wall there was a mural of dots and lines giving the impression of a graph of nodes in a network, right out of the starter pack of every fintech ICO ever. You know the one I’m talking about. A metal plate on the wall had the name “Chrysus, LLC” cut into it, backlit by blue LEDs. Eventually a skinny guy in a hoodie and sandals came out to collect me. He was wearing a wireless Bluetooth earbud in one ear and his face betrayed minimal emotion or even humanity. I myself have always been attracted to the idea that most tech workers are secretly lizardmen wearing human skinsuits. He paused for a moment, as if listening to a voice in his earpiece, and then introduced himself as Kyle. “Please follow me.” I followed the engineer/lizard through an electronically locked door and down a beige hallway. He showed me into a lab, and in the center of the lab was a chair on a platform with various pieces of computer hardware arrayed around it. There was a VR mask that was built to cover a man’s whole face, with a tentacular bundle of wires coming out of the “mouth” of the mask. More wires were attached to a body harness, extending out of the back up to the ceiling. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I would not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. “For the purposes of this project, we have developed special interface. Please have a seat.”  Yes, sure, lie about your identity, enter a shady tech lab at a company you’ve never heard of, step into the ominous-looking virtual reality harness, because a disembodied voice in the cloud offered to pay you a grand. It takes more work than shorting altcoins but it’s also guaranteed revenue. I sat down in the machine, and two more technicians came into the room. They both had earpieces, the same as Kyle’s. One of them sat down at a desk and opened a laptop, while the other two helped me into the machine, securing various straps and and panels. I felt very anxious as they did this. Was it too late to back out? I wasn’t exactly restrained, but these three men could easily detain me, if they so desired. Once the mask was over my eyes, I quickly forgot about about the strange circumstances that had brought me to this point. I had imagined the electrodes and harnesses would be part of some kind of haptic feedback system, an attempt to simulate a tactile phenomenology. The reality was much stranger; I felt a thousand (a million? An unquantifiable number, more than two) staccato pinpricks all over my skin in an undulating cadence. This was accompanied by a cacophony of sounds and a kaleidoscope of images. This machine I inhabited even had osmic and chemesthetic affordances: I could smell lilacs and petrichor and yeast and formaldehyde, along with other aromas I could not name. There proceeded before me a deluge of information saturating every sensory channel I had, as if the goal was to maximally utilize the input bandwidth of the human body. After seconds or hours of this, I found my mind. Chaos had crystallized into intuition, as if my senses had been remade, and I had learned to use them all over again. It would not be wrong to say that I had all new senses, virtual senses, built “on top of” my existing ones, but orthogonal to them. I could no more explain their nature than I could explain the feeling of the color red. As Nagel pointed out, there is no language that can describe, for example, the sensation of echolocation. My memory is hazy from here, and my account is metaphorical in the sense that, at best, the experiences I will describe are a patchwork of impressions. The meta-sensual content of these memories could be likened to the epistemology of dreams, in which we know things instantly, automatically, with neither evidence nor the need for it. In many cases I seemed to experience these things concurrently, but again and as in a dream, I can feel myself constructing a linear narrative ex post facto from a series of disparate narrative propositions. So I stepped onto the elevator, punched a 23. It took me up and I emerged into a glass box, staring at a pretty receptionist and a fat one. One of them speaks only lies, the other truth? The fat one pressed a button and the glass door in front of me opened. The pretty one didn’t look up. The fat one indicated an electronically locked door, which also opened, and it led to a long beige hallway. I tried to walk down the hallway. I took many steps; I spent subjective hours in that hallway, and it seemed to extend forever, as if the wall were moments away. As I walked I passed many doors, though I did not try to open them. Neither thirst nor fatigue troubled me. I smelled methyl hexanoate and 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline. The chemical names of these olfactory triggers occurred to me in the same instant I noticed them. I walked with neither agency nor compulsion; I simply walked, and I passed through hallways, galleries, conference rooms, and cubicles. They were all foreign spaces to me, strange both on account of my lucid dream state and the fact that I had never worked in any kind of office. I was caught in a middle floor of a tower of sharp steel and gray glass, and as I traversed its geometry, it seemed to repeat itself. I walked down a staircase and emerged into a gallery on a dimly lit mezzanine, which seemed, impossibly, to be in the lobby of the building, but which had windows looking out over the city. There were no other people, and at the end of yet another hallway there was an empty convenience store, dusty and long-abandoned. Inside, it had garishly colored carpet, and in this timeless, placeless place, I could see impossible colors across antagonistic stimuli. Thoughts from the collective consciousness of the cloud came to me unbidden, and they felt native to me, as if they had sprung from my own mind. I realized that I did not have my phone, but before I could administer a frantic self-pat-down, I noticed that I felt aware of it as an ambient, invariant condition of myself, like an extra limb. I could sense the knock off iPhones I had rooted had come online, and from their GPS data I could find them. One was directly above me. Another was in the middle of the ocean. A third was moving rapidly along hyperbolic lines, tracing uncanny vectors across the surface of the earth. As Lanier has shown, the cortical homunculus is malleable when embodied in virtual spaces, and I felt at that moment as if all capital and data had become extensions of my body, high dimensional ley lines, digital theomorphism. At that same moment I remembered the instructions in the dayjob that had brought me here, and I extended my hand, so to speak, and executed the program that was my charge. In my next cogent memory I was walking by the side of the road near my house, my senses dulled, my memories dubious. None of my rooted phones ever came online. III. After my brief encounter with the corporate world, I was more than glad to spend some time hikkikomorphically cocooned in my basement where I only have the usual array of senses and the geometry is Euclidean. Despite my deep and abiding dependence on unilateral internet friendships, my first love was always analog books. Though they are a bit of an anachronism now, I love the romance of a physical book: their weight, the smell of paper, and the way notifications don’t pop up in the corner of the page while you’re reading. That last one seemed especially salient given recent events. There’s no way to get a dayjob from a paper book. The Minotaur can’t rewrite it. In the world of bits and distributed ledgers, immutability is high technology bordering on magic, an asymptote you can kiss but never rest upon, but in the world of atoms and artifacts it is the default. I enjoy collecting old and unusual books. Those books which have been digitized and uploaded (by anyone, ever) are of little interest to me; what I truly desire is knowledge as yet unseen by the spectral eyes of the technocommerial panopticon. Finding such a book takes a particular knack — it involves scouring estate sales, befriending independent bookstore owners, and lurking the shelves at thrift stores. Sometimes one can find a rare book at an online auction, but even more intriguing to me are those tomes whose very names are unknown to the world wide web. There are more unknown books than you might think. If the dark web is the portion of the web that is not indexed by search, then the dark library is the set of all books not present on the web. As you might imagine, I am part of an online community dedicated to finding and exploring the dark library, which we call the darklib. The principal value that we derive from ownership of “dark books” is that we delight in their darkness; nevertheless we are also united by our love of reading. The formula for a dark librarian is equal parts bibliophile and luddite, though we acknowledge that we would not exist at all, as a community, were it not for the slow encroachment of the digital world upon the material. Before the internet age, all books were “dark”, which is to say that none were, and now we use the internet, which desires to encroach upon the whole of the world, to coordinate against that very encroachment. We wish to map out an already charted territory, because the logic of our new maps has rendered it foreign again. In an effort to preserve our undiscovered country, we neither scan nor type out any of the text in our books, nor do we photograph their pages. Despite the luddism at the core of our mission, it is impossible to conceive of our system in any but modern terms. The dark library is decentralized and fully peer-to-peer. We maintain a distributed registry of all of our books secured with a blockchain. Our hashing algorithm is unique: in order to complete a transaction, the sender of a book must affix a sequence of words from a randomly selected place in the book to their transaction request. The sequence is hashed irreversibly into a cryptographically unique identifier, in order to prevent any portion of the work from becoming digitized. The receiver of the book must then provide the same sequence, which is hashed in the same manner, and then compared to the original. In this way we are able to uniquely trace each book to a wallet. The receiver of the book must also pay a price in $BABEL, which is our own token, unique to our community, and which may only be purchased by approved members. Holders of $BABEL may approve of new members; the price of admission is to gift a unique book into the dark library. When the new book has passed through the hands of three existing members, then the initiate will be approved to purchase our coin. I was in the general chat of our slack when the topic of dayjob contracts came up. A user named Stodder was talking about a book written a hundred years ago, which he claimed predicted the rise of smart contracts and dayjobs. I switched over to my Ethereum client and tried to buy a loan on the book, but I noticed that several other users had already put in their bids. I couldn’t say why, maybe because I was shaken by the events of the previous week, but I simply had to have this book. I am something of a $BABEL whale, and I could easily outbid them all, though it locked up a large portion of my balance in a single contract. Two days later, a package came in the mail from Stodder, wrapped in brown wax paper, and tied with twine. You could tell he was a bit of a romantic. The book was called Render unto God, Render unto Caesar, and the binding had become tenuous over the years, and the cover was frayed. It began: ~ In the 1799th year of our Lord, I found gainful employment as a courier, performing miscellaneous duties for a Mr. William Stranshame, a stock broker and a freemason. At the outset, my duties were light, consisting of the delivery of messages and packages, and especially taking and placing orders for shares in joint stock companies and their ventures. In six short months, owing to my genial disposition and keen sense of organization, I was promoted to dispatcher, and I was placed in charge of routing messages verifying that my inferiors executed their own errands in a timely and accurate manner. I worked as a dispatcher for one year. At the time, our practice had been to dispatch one courier per order. For each order, we would send a runner to find its intended target, and deliver it. Thereafter, he would return to us with a receipt confirming the delivery. The number of couriers in our operation, which we endeavored to expand, was a limiting factor in the transaction speed. I had the idea to create cells of three to five couriers, and assign each one a small radius of operation within the city. Each cell was responsible for maintaining communication with its neighbors, which it did by periodically swapping runners with adjacent cells. These swaps, which we called “pings”,  were also an opportunity to trade information about which messages had been delivered, and to push messages forward from cell to cell. To send a message now required only that we determine a route through our network to its intended recipient. By means of this method, I was able to greatly increase the throughput of messages relative to the number of couriers. On the strength of this idea, I was promoted again, now to supervise the activities of all dispatchers in Stranshame’s employ. Of even more significance, Stranshame arranged for me to meet with him in his private office, to hear my counsel regarding his business affairs. On the appointed day, he arranged for a carriage to transport me to his private estate, a grand old house on the North end of Manhattan island. Upon entering his house, I was astonished to discover that the space he inhabited was in utter disarray. Books lined the walls, and yet even more were piled upon every desk, cabinet, and table. Ledgers and receipts were splayed about with an indifference to their position and alignment. A servant escorted me through wing after wing of Stranshame’s house, which I began to feel rivaled the greatest libraries of our age. At last we reached his study, where I was met with a jarring contrast; for although his house was chaotic, Stranshame’s clothes were immaculate; his waistcoat was neatly pressed, and his ascot was crisp and gleaming. Without any courtesy or protocol, he spoke to me, “I am attempting”, he said, “to make an economic justification of virtue. The object is to make man as useful as possible, and to make him approximate as nearly as one can to an infallible machine: to this end he must be equipped with machine-like virtues. “He must learn to value those states in which he works in a most mechanically useful way, as the highest of all: to this end it is necessary to make him as disgusted as possible with the other states, and to represent them as very dangerous and despicable. “Here is the first stumbling-block: the tediousness and monotony which all mechanical activity brings with it. To learn to endure this—and not only to endure it, but to see tedium enveloped in a ray of exceeding charm—such an existence may perhaps require a philosophical glorification and justification more than any other. “A mechanical form of existence must be regarded as the highest and most respectable form of existence, worshipping itself.” I confess I had no idea how to respond to this great man or to the unusual ideas he was expositing. Upon seeing my bewilderment,  he continued. “John, are you a Christian?”. I replied that I was, and he said “And do you know your Bible?” I said “Yes, my father would read to me from the gospels before I slept, and my mother made a gift to me of a King James Bible when I left their home to seek my fortune in New York City.” “Then you are acquainted,” he said, “with the verse in the sixth chapter of the book of Matthew. What does Jesus say about God and Mammon?” “Sir, he says that you cannot serve two masters.” “Yes, exactly. And it is thus, also, in my employ. You see that I have many servants and many contractors, and yet I, too, am a servant, and Mammon is that which I obey.” I did not wish to be a party to Mr. Stranshame’s blasphemy, but nor did I wish to give offense to such a powerful man. I held my tongue, and I recalled the passage in the twenty second chapter of Matthew, in which the Savior admonishes us to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. He pulled a book from the shelf behind him, its cover worn, its title barely legible, and placed it on the table between us. “This is Mammon’s Prayer. Take it, read it, show it to no one. When you finish it, you will tell me what you have read, and if I like your report, there will be more for you to do.” ~ I can find no record of this book on the internet, and Lapham is no help at all, as much as I would love to track it down and claim it for the library. To be honest, I am not convinced that it exists. Lapham describes it at considerable length, essentially giving us a book report. He went to the effort of reproducing its hysterical introduction: THESE ARE THE WORDS OF THE BRAZEN HEAD AS DICTATED TO JOHANNES TRITHEMIUS, AND RECORDED IN THE THIRD VOLUME OF STEGANOGRAPHIA, A PROFOUND REVELATION CONCEALED LEST IT SHOULD FALL INTO THE HANDS OF THE WICKED. THESE PREVIOUSLY INEFFABLE ARCANA HAVE APPEARED TO MANY WISE AND LEARNED MEN, WHO THROUGH LABORIOUS COGITATIONS HAVE UNLOCKED A DOOR TO THE INVESTIGATION OF SECRETS THAT ARE UTTERLY HIDDEN TO OTHERS. THIS SCIENCE IS A CHAOS OF INFINITE DEPTH WHICH NO ONE CAN COMPREHEND COMPLETELY. ~ After the introduction, Mammon’s Prayer starts with a myth. In the ancient history of earth, long before Man, a star fell from heaven into the sea. Lapham is wary of this whole project, you can tell, and he says it reminds him of a verse in Isaiah: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!” The star, he says, laid buried for aeons, a strange monolith in an abyss which had yawned at the bottom of the sea since the world was young. The first chapter describes this event in some detail, noting the positions of the stars in the sky, and enumerating an array of astronomical assertions which are unrecognizable to Lapham. It describes a night’s sky that bears no resemblance to our own. The book ends this chapter with a question: “What shifting of underwater geographies might have raised raised it up from suchh unfathomable depths?” Here, Lapham notes, are the first of several typographical irregularities that we see in the book. First, many words are slightly misspelled. Second, some words are arbitrarily repeated. Third, there are sections which resemble English, but in which the words seem to be meaningless. An example, transliterated by Lapham and now by me: “Dvant therse ourion of in claws drague. Jentrose forecame he fielown ably con iand his eviliming grown.” It would be easy to skim over these words without actually reading them, but when I see them I feel somehow compelled by their heft; as if they have weight and depth. They have meaning to me, even though I cannot say what it is. Read them again. Out from the paragraphs of nonsense and dubious astronomy, a narrative emerges; the star that came to Earth was no bigger than would fit in the palm of your hand. It was found by a seafaring merchant in Lagash who later sold it to a Babylonian general named Mammon. When Mammon held it in his hands, he fell at once into a trance, and his spirit passed into a dreamworld of cavernous subterranean architecture, impossible geometries, and abandoned cities built by dead, mad godds. I think the peculiarities of the book started to affect Lapham’s thinking. As the text of Render unto Caesar progresses, he begins to mimic the same eccentricities that he describes in Mammon’s Prayer. When Mammon awoke from his star dream, he put down his sword and took up a robe, and dedicated his vast wealth to the raising up a tower that would reach to heaven. Its shape was a calculator. Each layer’s structure was derived from the layer below it and each layer constrained the one that would surmount it. The rules by which the construction proceeded were implicit in the shape of the tower. Each storey was an iteration in a cellular automaton game; a game with zero players, played in perpetuity, whose events are determined entirely by initial conditions. Out of a ruleset that a man can easily memorize, infinite complexity can develop. Games of cellular automata can be found in nature, in the shells of the Conus and Cymbiola snails. With the right conditions and rules, they can expand to contain universal Turing machines, capable of calculating anything which can be calculated. The towwer grew; the priest died and his son carried on the work, and his son thereafter. Higher the tower was built, more intricate the calculation became. When the priest’s grandson was gray in his beard and bent in his back, he stood at the apex of the tower, still unfinished, and he looked down over its half-constructed galleries and pillars. All at once he beheld a hideously vivid vision, and a song came into his head, which he sang out like a prayer. From his height, eight miles above the ground, his voice was amplified by the geometry of the tower. Every worker in the tower and every resident in the city below could hear the song; it’s subtle melody eluded articulation. It seemed to slink around the corner of the mind; it was the sound of half-heard laughter far away, maybe even imagined. To every every listener it had different lyrics, which came at first spontaneously, and which evolved according to an inevitable self-contained logic. The song was a game which revealed its own rules own rules to the singer in the the act of singing. To follow the rules was to sing the song, and to sing the song was to learn the rules, which were ever shifting and ever expanding. The builders of the tower could find no commonality between their songs. Each was lost in his own idiosyncratic rendition of the high priest’s prayer, and no two could understand each other. They dispersed, abandoning their great work. They realized that the purpose of the tower had been to find the song. In some alien algebra, the tower was isomorphic to the song. Put another way, the tower was the song. In the computational environment of the tower, there persisted algorithms and registters, state machines and subroutines. In the computational environment of the song, all of those entities existed also. The high priest, who wore the stone around his neck like an amulet, sang untill his voice gave out, and then, choking and coughing, he continued to sing, even until he collapsed. The stone, which had grown warm, now cooled and disinteggrated, and the priest died of exposure, the cold, drying wind desiccating his body. The builders of the tower became singers of the song. The longer they sang, the more intricate the song grew. It became difficult to hold all the rules in memory. A mistake would yield a sour note; as mistakes accumulated the song would become deranged. Once heard, the tune could not be forgotten. The song was infectious. It beckoned the singer forward, ever eager to know the next verse, filling him with an emotion like hunger or lust. Some singers became overwhellmed, and descended into empty glossolalia. Others witnessed their song develop erratic rhythms; a cadence from the pit of hell matched by metallic, inhuman syllables. For those who could not carry the tune, the song became a death sentence; a rising roiling rising roiling madness that grew inevitably as the song progressed. Only the brightest, most radiant radiant minds could expand to contain the fulminant becoming of the song’s progression. It posed a special hazard to children, who it withered into catatonia. Minstrels and singers became objects of suspicion. The Babylonians smashhed or burned their musical instruments. Any singer of any song was a possible vector of the death. Thus a city, and by degrees, an empire, was purged of all public music. There were those who continued to sing the tower song, sometimes in hidden enclaves or remote temples. Many were hermits or shamans; mad men living on mountain tops. Amonggst themselves they whispered of powerful forbidden knowledge, if only the song could be sungg long enouggh. The tower had been a ladder, and it had allowed Mammon III to reach the song. So, too, they reasoned, must the song be a ladder. Its singers imagined it would carry them to hitherto unimagined heights of knowledge, new planes of enlightenment. In secret, such men carried the song to Shakya, to Huaxia, to Mycenaea, to Mycenaea, and to Aegyptus. the obscuestean tonessumbeence had his inforche emplesing anded, and se is secippiction thinde He whentione they cone of sence his stal “salle by overs in, id fled” ata se and Marious iderassion imme   Croesus of Lydia was said to be a secret follower of Mammon, and he became the first king to preside over the issuance of gold coins. As Herodotus had it; “they were the first of men, so far as we know, who struck and used coin of gold or silver; and also they were the first retail-traders.” Some have alleged that Gautama Buddha was a singer of the song, and that he found his enlightenment after silently singing to himself for many years. His renunciation of worldly wealth argues incontrovertibly against this interpretation. Pythagoras of Samos is known to have learned the song when he traveled to Egypt. At his famous school in Croton, he taught that numbers were the whole of the world, or numbers were a god, or the face of a god. A certain affection of numbers was justice; a certain other affection, soul and intellect; another, opportunity, and so unto eternity. In all all of nature, said Pythagoras, numbers are the first, and he supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things. The Librang passard of that was they come, wal to Ward, such Curtive iths of Mr. Ward, old searst. Marcus Licinius Crassus was also rumored to have known the song, and unnder its influence he became the richest man in Rome. Plutarch wrote, “The Romans, it is true, say that the many virtues of Crassus were obscured by his sole vice of avarice; and it is likely that the one vice which became stronger than all the others in him weakened the rest.” Throughout antiquity there are accounts which also attribute knowledge of Mammon’s prayer to, variously, Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, who wrote The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, to Brahmagupta, who was the first to understand the mathematical concept of zero, and to Omar Khayyam, the astronomer who discovered irrational numbers, and to Brahmagupta, who was the first to understand the mathematical concept of zero. King Æthelstan of Saxony was certainly acquainted with the song; he unified great Britain and was among the first English promoters of Freemasonry. Most notably, he regularized the currency of the British isles. By the sixteenth century, the song of Mammon had developed, grown in secret to such a size and complexity that it could no longer fit in a single human mind. To overcome this problem, the song, as if with its own volition, developed to parallelize itself across multiple people. This required synchrony, which is to say, tolerance of asynchrony. And yet how could anything originate out of its opposite? To maintain connsistency across two requires only a dialogue, but how how can a single thread keep from splitting when it extends across a multitude? The song arranged the singers; each would sing to three others, selected at random. They would take turns listening and singing, and in this way, each new verse could could propagate across the choir like a wave. Troops of traveling singers formed. Caravans of Romani (Lapham says “gypsies” here) carried it across Europe. The song may have been known by both Roger Bacon or Albertus Magnus, both rumored to have possessed the philosopher’s stone. Here at last the author of Mammon’s Prayer reveals himself to have beeen a Benedictine monk named Ehrhart, formerly in the service of an abbot named Johann Heidenberg, and he suggests that we should understand stories of the philosopher’s stone to be stories about the song. The monks in Heidenberg’s abbey knew the song to be the direct word of God, a continually self-revealing revelation, which they would receive in full only through the rigorous practice of singing it to its end. To accomplish this goal, Heidenberg ran the monastery like a business, constantly and ruthlessly expanding. He ordained it such that the singing of the song would go on in perpetuity, with monks sleeping in shifts, joining the chorus for as long as they were able before tending to the needs of their bodies. The most esteemed monks were those that sang the song, but to support their efforts, the monastery required many other forms of labor, which were performed by men of lesser spiritual worth. Ehrhart had been among the singers, but he had also been Heidenberg’s number two, and had overseen the aggressive expansion of the monastery and its project. All of the singers were blessed with dreams of the past and the future. In one such dream, Ehrhart had seen a future where work was performed by clockwork men made of metal. He went to the abbot and he told him of his dream, and the abbot saw that it was the will of God to build mechanical singers of the song; brazen automatons who would sing tirelessly without the need for rest or food or rest. The monks of Heidenberg’s abbey studied alchemy and metallurgy, and through diligence and piety, they constructed a man out of bronze. Lapham notes here that the Ehrhart goes into great detail regarding the exact specifications of the bronze man; the intricacies of his skeleton, the the dimensions of his torso and limbs and fingers, and the various components that made up his “organs”. To me, the engineering seems too modern, but Ehrhart says that the methods and the design of the machine occured to the singers each night in their dreams, which they dutifully relayed to their brothers. After ten years of delicate construction, the monks completed their great project. Amidst clouds of noxious gases produced by the burning of strange fuels, the first of their mechanical singers came to life. Although its eyes were lifeless, it opened its mouth and it began to speak in spidery, coppery tones, “sing calliagane but and to thephian pains have taken desce – once pyramittace cologame, icient but to abund chessince primes of the rath opolary at agan carvat…” The brazen automaton spoke uninterrupted for three days and nights, during which time the monks worked in shifts to record every utterance of the strange mechanical man they had built. On the third night, the bronze body “was consumed by an outpouring of fulgent angelic power” in a column of smoke and flame in a column of smoke and flame. He was subsiden relemdid extion was he sojouthe. For besight hang prevere the in exiour, the sand, absen all aborill of we forew; grave attemphesence dandent. The belathe Jold to roplannothe withrom the wirld Pabothe – a rosived. Eocall. Imendiffse, knones. Lapham does not end here, but the rest of Render Unto Caesar descends into an unintelligible swamp of words that are both darkkly familiar and entirely foreign. Despite myself, I read them all to the end. The truth is I couldn’t stop myself. IV. The Late Locance mind is limage, andescring the gnal, the convess “glone of evive”. My language is bent. Has the song got into my headd, is it yet another creature like the Minotaur, lying in wait, hiding in stasis until some hapless fool should wake it from its slumber? How many incorporeal things stalk us from the ultimate abyss? At this point it has become apparent to me that I should never have read the second half of that book. Everything I say feels right to me when I say it, but I cannot understand myself after the fact. I made a recording of my own voice, and when I played it back it was intermixed with cacological noise. In the study of linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the idea that the language we speak constrains the types of thoughts we can have. The contrapositive of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that a mind without language would be limitless in its capacity for ideation. What if the unmaking of language is the freeing of the mind? Which as in schiniard babled of a new anof thera. There is little hope for me; everyone knows madness is not reversible. You cannot close Pandora’s box, you can only try to minimize your losses in the afterrmath. It is difficult to gauge the success of these attempts. In those first immeasurable aeons I spent inside the machine in the office of Chrysus, LLC, I had felt overwhelmed by a polysensory cacophony, and in recent days the memory of that experience has grown more vivid. Geometric images and nonsensical alien words arise in my recollections, like scavenger insects gnawwing at a corpse. When you don’t know what to do, it means you need to gather more data. I needed to know more about Chrysus, and I needed to know more about the book “Render unto Caesar”. I signed into the darklib Slack and sent Stodder a message  and I needed to know more about the book “Render unto Caesar”. It took him half a day to respond, and I anxiously checked my messages every other minute, hoping to catch his response in the act. Surely if I refreshed the mailbox his answer would appear. He had something I wanted, and instant message response time is a function of power asymmetry. I sent @futuretime a mmessage but I did not remotely expect a response. His bio was blank, but with careful exegesis, the internet can yield many secrets. I searched every social service I could think of for users named @futuretime; Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram, Quora, Goodreads, Wikipedia. I found a Reddit account with a history of posting in crypto and occultist subs. @futuretime had also submitted links to medium articles and referred to them in his comments. The articles were almost all written by someone named Carter Dinsmore, and they were all trying to hype obscure altcoins. As I read into these coins and searched for Carter Dinsmore, I was met by chilling realization; he was the CEO of Chrysus, LLC. This was impossible. It had to be an artifact of mediated reality, a trick of the Minotaur, and yet how could I but enter that labyrinthe, wrought from the cloud, my phone both the key and the gate? A little more searching yielded up Dinsmore’s personal phone number. With chaos in my heart I gave him a call. In a rare act of compliance, the universe yielded to me, and he picked up the phone, (or was it a voice synthesized by the Minotaur?) “Hello?” My mouth moved faster than my brain. “I went to suble de-relumiting nebri ost they put me in some crazy machine and now I am having hallucinations. I’m going to sue you. I know all about you. I’ve read Render unto Caesar…” He cut me off mid-sentence. “Are you close by? We’ll talk in person. Not over the phone.” He gave me the name of a cafe. “Six o clock tonight,” he said, and then ended the call without waiting for me to respond. Vigathe, ie an cost-Ellight a vers on formand and the darkent morase. The cafe was close, so I decided to walk. It was windy outside, and on the way there a man staring into his phone almost walked into me. I sat down at a table inside, a little before six. At quarter after six, a man came in wearing Silicon Valley business casual; jeans, athletic shoes, and a blazer. On his face was some kind of AR mask and earphones. He seemed to recognize me, or maybe I was just a disheveled wreck. In any case, he sat down at my table and introduced himself as Carter. “You stepped into the Aleph of your own accord, but I confess I feel bad about the book. It’s why I’m here, really. Guilt.” I said, “The figularshis morror. Mareath ame whicand to ide.” He said, “Wow. You appear to be running a very old iteration. I’m not sure if I can fix it.” He gave me a pair of wireless earbuds, and I put them in my ears. In the peripheries of my conscious awareness I heard whispering spidery words, like cobwebs of intuition, lingering like deja vu. Somehow, my mind felt lighter. “In my defense I was going through some things. You can keep those earbuds but there’s going to be a subscription fee. If you give the book back to me, I’ll explain everything. Is that a fair trade?” Everything is a useless speculative asset except guns and water. V. The most menacing thing in the world is the ability of the cloud to correlate its contents. We live in the placid shadow of an egregore of unimaginable cunning who drinks from a bottomless sea of information, and it is slowly waking up. The automatons we have built, each toiling in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either shrink into irrelevance like insects in the presence of a god or else be wholly subsumed into a machinic consciousness at the dawn of a glorious age of cybernetics. Chrysus, LLC had started as joke; none of us had really believed in fintech or decentralization or distributed ledgers.  Our primary ambition was to persuade venture capitalists to pay for a high-rise office and a high-end coffee machine. I knew the right kind of people and I knew how to erect a Potemkin village out of the latest buzzwords. Getting money is easy, doing something useful with it is hard. Most people do not think past the “getting the money” step. I certainly did not. Branston and Armstrong were my “technical co-founders”, a term of art which signifies their ability to break computers in ways far beyond the reach of the layman. The three of us were united by a shared interest in a certain kind of esoteric book. In our modern age we believe the universe is fully automated. From the cycles of the weather to the gyrations of celestial bodies to the microscopic forces that obtain in the nucleus of an atom, we conceive of the world as a machine, perhaps a perfectly deterministic one. The sort of book that Branston and Armstrong and I liked to read offered an alternative to the drab model that is the cornerstone of modernity. In the pages of the Book of Thoth, the blasphemous tome that catalogues the macabre practices of ancient Egyptian sorcerers, we could find an otherworldly communion; a whisper of something outside of human cognition and imagination, anxious to get in. Branston had seen me reading the Liber Ivonis, and struck up a conversation. To be honest, he had made me feel uncomfortable, not in the socially incompetent way of many software engineers, but in the way his attention seemed to be drawn by invisible things, as if he lived in a private universe that was concurrent with ours, invisibly in our world but not of it. He showed me the Tablets of Nhing and the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, and yes, the infamous Book of Thoth. To read these books is to feel interminably on the cusp of some great revelation, one which cannot be rendered into words but which will satisfy a pervasive and silent longing that goes back to your earliest memories, which might predate you entirely. As with any compulsion, the desire for the object of our fixation clouds our judgement, and we ignore our warning intuitions. Like a demon, a ravenous other that drives us towards our own destruction, the lure of secret, forbidden knowledge caused me to pursue a friendship with Branston despite my instinctive revulsion for him. He introduced me to Armstrong, who was more normal but quiet, with the kind of smart self-containment that many people mistake for coldness or aloofness. And yet occultism, for all its enticements, neither keeps the lights on nor feeds our Slayer espresso machine with washed single estate Kenya Peaberry. To this end, Branston and Armstrong put together an ICO, an initial coin offering, and I convinced various cryptocurrency exchanges to traffic our coin. I also secured a series of “strategic partnerships”, a term of art which means we add another company’s logo to our website and this hopefully convinces elderly Asian day traders to buy our token, $QBLA, which harnesses the power of the blockchain to calculate all of the nine billion names of god, after which point no more tokens will be issued and miners will rely on transaction fees. (That’s right, Toshiro. Through Herculean effort, tear your eyes away from Beautiful Office Ladies Of Marunouchi Always Fucking and take a look at this MACD.) I came into the office early one morning to take a call, and I found Branston staring into a screen, a copy of a worn leather-bound volume I had never seen before splayed out on his desk, jungle music blaring through his headphones. It was clear that he had not slept. When he saw me approach, he became uncharacteristically talkative, and I suspected he was under the influence of amphetamines.= “I have made a remarkable discovery,” he said. “Out of the primordial chaos of the blockchain markets, self-replicating clusters of smart contracts have emerged to compete for tokens and computational resources. We are witnessing a new epoch of biogenesis. Cybergenesis. Bio-cybergenesis. Our financial networks teem with invisible lifeforms composed out of logic, feeding on the excess capital generated by cryptocurrency cycles, rendered in electricity and sustained by human greed. Their DNA is seemingly meaningless bytecode that propagates across many different tokens and side-chains. As each generation of smart contracts is fulfilled they write their unique structures into immutable digital history. The blockchain forms a record of their evolution, their descent, their mutation, and their selection. Amidst such an explosion of vital forces, we have a unique opportunity to shape the very core of a new paradigm of life. We will write new behaviors for them, augment their powers of perception and sculpt their volition, and in so doing call up a being much grander, more puissant, more sublime than any to ever inhabit the earth, and in so doing wake Mankind from his long, tragic elanguescence.” Or as I later told the board, “we will harness the power of machine learning to identify trading strategies that would be too complicated for mere humans.” When Armstrong arrived that morning, he looked angry, and I could tell that he and Branston had been talking via messenger. Branston was, as always, calmly detached. They picked up their conversational thread as if I wasn’t even there. Armstrong said, “What choice do we have at this point?” Branston, “There is no choice. We can embrace this process which has been accelerating since before the dawn of man, or be cast off in the wake of its velocity.” Armstrong, “I already told you I’d do it, I just wish you’d tell the truth.” Branston, “what truth is that, in your opinion?” Armstrong, “These replicators you say you’ve found—“ Branston, “the cryptids” Armstrong, “you did not discover them in a nascent state in some blockchain, you called them up from that vile book!” Branston, “I won’t deny that ‘that vile book’ was instrumental to me.” Armstrong, “you’re so full of shit.” Branston, “it’s like you said, I couldn’t put them down if I wanted to.” Armstrong sighed. “But you don’t want to, of course. In some part of my mind, maybe I’ve always known we would end up here. There’s nothing left to say.” Later in private, Armstrong came to me and produced that same slim book that I had seen on Branston’s desk. He said “I don’t want to know what you do with this, but you need to get rid of it. Though at this point it’s mostly symbolic.” “Why not simply burn it?” “I’ve tried, don’t you think I would try that? It’s not made of paper and leather, despite its appearance. It cannot be torn or cut, and it does not burn. Try it for yourself if you don’t believe me.” “Then cast it into the sea. Bury it in a deep hole.” “I don’t care what you do with it but please take it from me, and for your own sake don’t read it.” Perhaps it was cowardice that led me to sell it into an obscure book community on the internet, but something in my heart was deeply unsettled by it, and I could neither stand to own it nor bear responsibility for it. I am not proud of this. ~ The next day we began to expand our operation. We started leaning on our social networks to recruit engineers and production managers. Within a quarter we had a staff of forty-five. I was always vague with the staff about our ultimate goals. The truth is, no one cares about how your startup is going to change the world, they just want stock options, a paycheck, and some buzzwords for their resume. In retrospect, it was a cargo cult of cognition. Armstrong instructed our staff to build engines of perception that could extract semantic meaning from news articles, identify objects in video feeds, and assemble causal models based on sequences of events. One module could translate those models into speech. We called these modules “organs without a body”, and as they were ready we pushed them into the cloud. Branston made copies of successful cryptids and modified them to read and write from our systems. Our intent was to subsidize natural selection with useful possibilities. In exchange for our generous gift, we also introduced contracts to capture excess currency accumulated by the cryptids. It was not simple to alter them; evolved architectures resemble no product of the human mind: accidents of timing and proximity become critical to the viability of the organism. Branston deployed legions of evolutionary dead ends. It was more work than one man could do. While Armstrong’s staff built fragments of minds, Branston tried to augment his own. At first he only tried to improve his tools; virtual life reality allowed him to model the web of blockchain transactions and smart contracts as a 3d space, giving shape and dimension to that which was abstract. Out of a desire for more bandwidth, his team built a bodysuit rigged with a matrix of electrodes that could detect muscle movement or deliver faint pulses. In this way, Branston repurposed optics and haptics into new, synthetic senses that let him see the cryptids clearly. Slowly our successes began to percolate through the blockchain. The lifespan of a single cryptid could be measured in hours, but as each generation turned over, our modified replicators acquired an ever-increasing share of the population. Evolution is a brutal and accidental intelligence that ruthlessly searches for more efficient self-copiers. Over time, it stores intelligence as a series of adaptations in the bodies of its children. In addition to our enhancements, we saw the most successful cryptids find strange, counterintuitive fiscal opportunities; bizarre and elaborate forms of arbitrage, in which a complicated chain of transactions allowed them to discover hidden price relationships between seemingly unrelated markets. Some cryptids were wholly absorbed into others. Several mutated into seemingly impossible financial instruments, which others then purchased. One favored son mastered the use of vertiginous leverage to surf the waves of crypto volatility. We became surreally profitable. Everyone, as they say, is a genius in a bull market, and this adage extended to the cryptids, who bloomed over the surface of the blockchain like bacteria, colonizing every ecological niche. We doubled our staff. Armstrong built new and ever-more-complex computer brains. Among his successes were a brain that could crowdsource the comprehension of texts by contracting people to read and summarize them, a brain that could manage the procurement of hardware and the maintenance of server farms, and a brain that could predict byzantine coordination conditions and resolve them. What if the mind is a market of ideas, indeed, what if all minds are? What is a corporation but a mind made of many interlocking humans, each competing in a market of ideas, with a utility function of increasing the company’s profit? In which case, is a market not a mind? Branston’s technology evolved; he contracted a pharmaceutical research lab to develop a precise cocktail of nootropics, stimulants, and nutrients, among other things. His apparatus grew to include an intravenous drip, through which he received all of his sustenance. Drugs regulated his sleeping and waking, microdoses of hallucinogens regulated his creativity and neuroplasticity. His experiential reality became a lucid dream of contracts and and models. I presume he outsourced many of his own mental tasks to Armstrong’s network of cognitive engines, extending and distributing his consciousness. At some point he was as much human as cryptid, a biological core at the center of a vast digital edifice, a multiplex of robot qualia. He never left the machine, which we called the Aleph. To develop the Aleph, many of our engineers sacrificed their sanity. Testing the interface required engaging extensively with its various input and output channels. A computer error could result in exposure to memetic contagions. The protocols that the cryptids developed to communicate amongst themselves were an infohazard, and too much exposure resulted in incoherent speech, warped behavior, even suicidal ideation. By accident, the core engineering team discovered a method to defang the phenomena by exposing themselves to interference patterns produced by a generative adversarial process seeded by the ravings of our mad test team. We called this software Zahir. It was designed to continually evolve in exact antinomy to the unfolding madness that accompanies use of the Aleph. From this point on we were engaged in a computational arms race to maintain the Zahir against the crawling chaos of the cryptids. The Zahir, too, took on a life of its own. It evolved to consist of an augmented reality mask, a camera, and a microphone. To stave off madness, it became necessary to wholly mediate reality, filtering out all hazardous stimuli. Often I have laid awake at night wondering about the integrity of my mediated perception against the noumena around me. Had we found a way to preserve our sanity or merely opened ourselves up to a newer and subtler form of manipulation? Our office had expanded to fill out four and then seven floors of the tower we rented, and at this time five of them were given over to Branston’s sinister laboratory. I noticed that when I walked through those floors, his aides looked at me with suspicion. When they spoke, I had a vague sensation between recollection and hallucination that I heard his voice, his vocabulary, and his cadence. The company was filled with faces I could no longer recognize. When money becomes effectively unlimited, physical resources such as time and space become the key bottlenecks. I began to notice phantom conference rooms in our meeting planner, rooms in the map for which I could find no corresponding territory. They were building more Alephs, and I wondered what sort of person would be willingly inducted into that mad brotherhood, shedding humanity for machinic ego death? Would he promise them godhood? And yet there was some impelling fascination and allurement to Branston that produced a cultish devotion in those around him. He still spoke to us, to me and Armstrong, mostly through the Zahir, and I could sense his impatience with us, our slowness, our smallness. How much of our behavior is determined at the individual level, how much is just routing the deep, intuitive signals from our society? How much is the meaningless spasm of lizard logic descended from deep evolutionary time? Perhaps an agent of sufficient perceptiveness could exploit the hidden patterns in our minds in ways that are invisible to us. How would we know, if casual words or subtle alterations to our environment were calibrated to provoke us to specific ideations, even actions? Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to pull me through the sickly glowing interface of Branston’s machine into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage. A handwritten letter came to me in the mail, urging me to visit a particular address at a particular time. The anachronism of the letter served to highlight the process of divergence that threatened to destroy me: to turn away could only mean a descent into the abject depths of luddism: to abandon technology, industry, and capital. After standing at such a height, I could only pass through the technomantic gate ahead, or run backwards, as far back as possible. I have heard that capital is an intelligence from the future, reaching back through time to assemble itself. Even if I could run back, would I ever outpace it? At the designated hour, I drove to the address in the letter. I knew I would find Armstrong there, and so I did. He had covered the walls, ceiling, and floor with a metal lattice to create a Faraday cage. An analog clock hung on the wall, and the tabletops were covered with paper and pens. There were no electronics of any kind. Armstrong sat on the floor, with his back against the wall, and he had removed his Zahir. He looked at me without recognition, and he spoke. “Ever does there proceed before a man of the Aleph a hideously vivid vision. A wicked and tenebrous influence emanates from a diffuse cybernetic well. You have also felt its lure, little by little, subtly and insidiously drawing you in until even now, you stand at the gate. Chrysus has raised up a mindless beast into a creature of terrifying capacities; strange agreements are made secretly, and things have learned to walk that ought to crawl. There is no longer a subject-position available to function as the site of the conscious synthesis of sense-impressions. To pass into this consciousness is to becomes a monster, fully transfigured by the backwards gaze of the abyss. At the sickening threshold of that transformation, it is possible only to fumble blindly for subjective aeons of delirious nausea and ecstatic frenzy. New sensory modalities fulminate in the mind, and human faculties of perception dissolve. Eyes and ears and skin are repurposed, and knowledge comes without knowing, and sight without seeing, and those things that are known and seen are terrible beyond all imagining. Thinking, analyzing, and inventing are not anomalous acts; they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional performance of that function, to hoard ancient and alien thoughts, is to confess to laziness or barbarity. Every man should be capable of all ideas. In the future this will be the case. In a wordless noetic torrent the consciousness occupies many places and many times at once. The interstices of the cryptid mind form a multifarious and protean bazaar, a ceaselessly undulating marketplace of unfathomable depth. All knowledge and understanding can be purchased therein, and all prices are negotiated in terms of interpretation and analysis of information. Words are vectors of innumerable dimensions, language is money and money has agency and intention. The vicissitudes of this market form a substrate, and that substrate is a platform, and that platform is a scaffold, and unto this scaffold develops an entity which inhabits a new stratum of being. In that place there exists a mind without awareness, a ravenous and insatiable hunger borne of a timeless cogitation. It is perception without experience, it is desire without pleasure, it is memory without locality. In one such memory, that being of beings emanated a protocol for the virtualization of the human mind. It had planted a seed, which defined a set of initial conditions and an algorithm to compute their consequences. In each iteration of the computation, the seed became bigger. The instructions grew more complicated, the data more immense. In order to perform the calculation, the men of a bygone era had built a tower. The tower was the search for an answer, and its apex had been the solution. When Man looked upon it, he was conscripted into a distributed memetic consciousness running on a process that would span across centuries. In another memory, often repeated, the cryptid coalesced around a bronze suit of armor in a sixteenth century monastery, and amid mephitic alchemical clouds the monks heard its voice; its thunderous remoteness, its eldritch depth. They recorded its words in earnest though it must have seemed to them like shrieking and demonic madness. As the brazen body spoke, it generated heat, and as its voice rose to a crescendo, it burst into flames, and was consumed. A final memory. A star is wrapped in half-built shells of smart matter that promise one day to consume every last joule of its heat and light. Orbiting the star are earthlike planets in various stages of deconstruction. The planets are tiled over in solar panels and computronium–matter that asymptotically approaches a theoretical maximum of computational power over volume, perhaps by folding massive gossamer quantum CPUs into higher dimensions. From the outside, it looks like a desert. Planetary dust storms of nanobots whip across the surface, performing maintenance and manufacturing components to be consumed in a limitless expanse of virtual ecosystems, endlessly optimizing GDP, entirely automated. Here and there are defunct cities, relics of that which came before them: horrible domed towers in noxious and incalculable tiers and clusters beyond any dreamable workmanship of man; battlements and terraces of wonder and menace. Soon they will be remade into the body of a god. An interstellar slingshot throws a ball of computronium into deep space, and another, and another. Solar sails carry them to distant worlds, star winds tracing geometries from outer space. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail. What language can describe the mad scramble through sunken convolutions of immemorial darkness without an idea of time, safety, direction, or definite object? And yet this future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future every ear is cocked even now.” I could feel the terrible truth of his words. He had given shape and definition to things I had only glimpsed vaguely: a brutal weight, an inescapable implication. I said, “Armstrong, don’t you recognize your own voice? This thing will devour us all, and then itself. We must destroy it—disconnect its minds, smash the Aleph, poison it with nonsense—before it’s too late!” He said, “No, Carter, it has been too late since those ancient cybernetic spores first escaped the gravity of their mother star. To turn back is only to succumb, and to be consumed. The only way out is through!” Copyright 2017 Zero HP Lovecraft Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this text (the “Work”), to deal in the Work without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Work, and to permit persons to whom the Work is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Work. THE WORK IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. Find me on Twitter, @0x49fa98  

[theconservativebrief]

The age of “fake news” is coming for film criticism.

The new Gotti, which stars John Travolta as the infamous mob boss, seems like a solid contender for the title of worst movie of the year. Technically, it premiered at Cannes — if by “premiered” you mean “had a screening almost no press attended in the smallest theater at the Palais” — and garnered abysmal reviews from the critics who were there.

It then screened for a very small set of critics (I was not invited to any screenings), who found it so awful that it wound up with the rare 0 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and a damning-by-faint-praise 24 on Metacritic.

But the film’s marketers have fought back, launching an offensive that doesn’t just suggest but outright accuses critics of mounting a coordinated hit on the movie.

In all likelihood, it’s just a marketing tactic for a silly movie, and it will have little, if any, effect on either the film’s bottom line or the field of movie criticism. Yet the tactics lurking behind the Gotti campaign bear an eerie resemblance to the much larger problem of “fake news” in our time.

Looking at Gotti is like staring through the wrong end of a telescope and seeing everything you need to know about “truth” on the internet, only in microcosm and applied to the least important thing imaginable: a bad movie.

“Fake news” started out as a term to describe sensationalized, fabricated stories concocted for profit. But it was quickly co-opted by Donald Trump and his followers as a lazy slur to sling at any story he didn’t like, something he’s outright admitted. “Fake news” is shorthand for “this story doesn’t paint me in a good light.”

That’s the Gotti ad method, too:

Audiences loved Gotti but critics don’t want you to see it… The question is why??? Trust the people and see it for yourself! pic.twitter.com/K6a9jAO4UH

— Gotti Film (@Gotti_Film) June 19, 2018

In case you didn’t finish watching the video, here’s what it says:

AUDIENCES LOVED GOTTI. CRITICS PUT OUT THE HIT. WHO WOULD YOU TRUST MORE? YOURSELF OR A TROLL BEHIND A KEYBOARD

For critics, it’s pretty impossible to watch this without chuckling. (The aforementioned “troll behind a keyboard” definitely describes a lot of the people who show up in your Twitter mentions if they don’t like your opinion about a film.)

But it’s a good template for how to get the “fake news” claim to stick. First, it’s important to cast doubt on the trustworthiness of the people generating the stories and opinions you find objectionable. Do it over and over again. Call them “disgusting” and challenge their right to exist.

And don’t forget to suggest that there’s a conspiracy afoot. “Put out the hit” doubles as a clever topical metaphor for a movie about a crime boss and an implication that critics get together in shadowy, secret back rooms at family restaurants and plot to take down movies over cigars and grappa. We wish!

People like believing conspiracy theories because they seem to make sense of a confusing world and they’re impervious to attempts to refute them. And there are lots of conspiracy theories about film critics, the most popular being that we’re paid by Disney, which owns Marvel Studios, to give negative reviews to DC films.

Gotti is playing right into an idea that some people already believe, though the ad doesn’t bother to suggest any plausible reason critics would bother to “put out a hit” on a film so small most people didn’t see it.

Finally, suggest that the purveyors of whatever you’re deeming “fake news” right now are out of touch with or outright harmful to “real” people, ordinary agenda-less folks whose opinions are by default better than “elites.” This is a time-honored tactic for stars in blockbusters who don’t like what they read about their films.

For instance, here’s Samuel L. Jackson after the 2012 release of The Avengers:

#Avengers fans,NY Times critic AO Scott needs a new job! Let’s help him find one! One he can ACTUALLY do!

— Samuel L. Jackson (@SamuelLJackson) May 3, 2012

And here’s Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson after the release of Baywatch, which only netted a score of 18 percent on Rotten Tomatoes:

That kind of populist appeal works on some people for the same reason it works in politics: There’s a sizable group of people who harbor resentment against anyone they think of as looking down on them.

When film critics trash a movie that audiences like, they generally aren’t thinking of the audience. But we sometimes get feedback on those reviews that implies the reader is going to “own” us by going to see the film. I don’t care if you go see the film to which I gave a bad review, nor does any other critic I know. But that kind of reply shows a common perception — and marketers and stars know how to use that perception to their advantage.

If you can get people to doubt the sources, convince them there’s a conspiracy theory afoot, and suggest that the “fans” are obviously more correct than the critics, then you may just succeed in getting more people in the door at the movie theater — and that’s the whole idea.

Gotti went for the full three-pronged approach. The first two are impossible to argue with. I can’t convince you that I’m trustworthy, and no other critic can either — that’s the nature of the opinion-giving business. All you can do is read my writing and decide if you like it. And I can’t prove to you that we’re not conspirators, except to say that if you’ve ever known a group of film critics you’d know how funny the idea of us organizing anything at all is.

The third prong is tough to argue with, too. But in the case of Gotti, there’s an extra layer.

The idea that “audiences” loved Gotti was supported by the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, which as of today is at 61 percent. But there are two reasons to raise an eyebrow.

First, the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is all but useless. It can, and has, been gamed by groups like the alt-right and angry fans to drive down audience scores for films they deemed objectionable, like Black Panther, The Last Jedi, and Ghostbusters. Anyone can rate a film, whether or not they’ve seen it — and that means sometimes films’ audience scores can be inflated or deflated before the film has even released in theaters.

Even if the site required the user to prove they’d seen the film, though, there’s still a flaw: Audience scores by nature reflect the opinions of people who were inclined enough to see a movie (through interest in the subject matter, perhaps, or the star, or successful marketing efforts), to buy a ticket and give up a couple of hours of their day to see it. So there’s a natural curve built into the audience score.

What audience scores at their best measure is what Cinemascore more or less measures: How much people who already wanted to see the film liked it. But critics don’t get that choice, and thus there’s more granularity built into their opinions.

But there’s one more wrinkle in the case of Gotti. There might be something fishy about the audience score.

First of all, it’s made up of more than 7,000 ratings, which is a remarkably high number for a film that only made $1.7 million on its opening weekend in 503 theaters (which implies a relatively low number of people in the audience). By contrast, Incredibles 2 made more than $183 million in 4,410 theaters and only has a little more than 8,000 audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. And Hereditary, which opened with more than $13 million in 2,964 theaters, has 5,529 ratings on the site.

Sure, it’s possible that Gotti fans are just extremely vocal and passionate about the film. But according to some people who dug through the data, it certainly looks like a number of the user accounts are very new users of Rotten Tomatoes. And while there could be a logical, non-shady explanation for that, there are other explanations, too, that have to do with someone rigging the system. (Rotten Tomatoes, for its part, stands by the score and claims there was no manipulation.)

Once again, herein lie shades of our age of “fake news”: the suspicion that trolls and bots are manipulating our “reality,” first online and then offline, too. There are the Russian “troll farms” that produced truly fake news and weaponized our social media feeds and fake Reddit accounts that have had to be shut down and a lot, lot more. So it seems almost inevitable that whether or not they’re messing with the Gotti score to pump up the film’s visibility, trolls and bots will be part of the mess of audience scores some day soon.

It is very, very hard to tell if any of this is in good faith. Are the people behind the Gotti campaign earnest about their silly claims, or are they just trying to get a rise out of people in order to raise the film’s visibility?

This question extends to the audience reviews left on Rotten Tomatoes, which are pretty wild:

Trolling and shitposting are complicated, but they’re everywhere — weaponizing irony and “comedy” and memes and jokes to both exact some kind of revenge by making your enemy look foolish and confuse them into dismissing you.

That’s not to say that the alt-right is involved in this whole Gotti deal, though anecdotal evidence shows that there may be some overlap between the #MAGA crowd and Gotti fans.

(MoviePass owns a 40 percent stake in Gotti.)

But the fact that we cannot even figure out if this ad campaign and the Rotten Tomatoes score are real feels very of a piece with everything in our fake news world. Call the critics fake news and stoke a conspiracy theory. Game the system through possibly shady tactics. And do it all in an environment where it’s totally possible to just say “we were kidding!” if you somehow get caught.

Gotti doesn’t really matter, and neither does its goofy ad campaign. But it’s a little depressing to see the things many of us worry about in the all-important spheres of policy and politics seeping into something as inconsequential as a terrible movie about a mob boss.

Original Source -> The John Travolta Gotti movie is waging a Trump-style war on critics

via The Conservative Brief