Cool New Idea for New Ideas

Almost everyday while in the shower I come up with an array of insane, inane and disturbingly awful ideas for some form of narrative story. I have habitually and systematically come to the self-agreement that the idea is too ungrounded, sociopathic or even boring to take anywhere further that a mind fart, all by the time I step out the bathroom. As such, up to this point I have turned precisely zero ideas into real, cohesive, tangible novels (other media forms are available). I will occasionally stumble across one that I particularly like, scribble down a hundred ideas all at once into a .txt file and then spend hours deliberating the details of the story, and exactly how this master plan of mine will make me rich. By the time the morning hits, I have realised that my story is barely even worth my own thought time, never mind anyone else's. Of course, the real reason is that I just can't be bothered to actual see a large scale project all the way to the end, because by far the most exciting stage is coming up with zany ideas and being carried away with the sensation that you obtain, as you have always known, an intellect that rivals even Aristophles* or other smart sounding people. So forever these ideas stay perpetually as a few kilobytes of txt file rotting in my hard drive, to be occasionally read and either promptly deleted or laughed at by the oh-so smart me of 6 months time. *Not a guy.

Well this shit don't sit right with me. I don't like having these ideas for cool stories; which, at least for a few delirious hours, I had thought were destined to be the next Macbeth, just to watch them slowly die in a closed-system cyber-hell of ideas without hope of escape. However, I also know that I am in fact a lazy shit who ain't writing no real novel any time soon, I have more important stuff to do like [insert thing I do here]. So I have devised a plan to appease my morality while not actually having to do any hard graft. As soon as I have these ideas I will leap out of the shower and onto the internet where I'll type that shit into a semi-prose, semi-blog style post where I can at least put these ideas somewhere that it is possible for someone to read, I'm talking to you, that one guy who consistently views every post I make and lives in the UK. I know you, Blogger has a cool stalking feature where I can view the viewing activity for specific IPs. Hide your fucking cat, I'mma coming for it. Anyhows, this series of posts will be as regular as anything else, but I'll at least try to keep it going for a while. And don't worry, it'll still be written in a completely esoteric (I actually looked up the definition of that word finally) and incomprehensible format beloved by all my doting fan. That way nobody will ever dare steal my amazing intellectual property and I don't even need to sell my soul to the Illuminati for a patent or however that works.

Post Scriptum:

I originally came up with this idea on the final carriage of a train of thought that originally started in itself as a stupid story idea, evolving into a autopsychoanalysis and eventual inevitable post-existential paradigm flip were I realised that if I do a small amount of work, I can avoid feeling guilty about not having done a large amount of work. Perfect. But writing this right now I've already gone over the tipping point and my original story idea is incarcerated in a cringe containment cell somewhere near my mid-frontal hippocampus. Oh well. I'll be sure to catch the next idea before I realise its potential for mass crimes against the collective human conscience and apprehend it for what it really is, a form of incidental psychological warfare that was rightly banned by the UN constitution decades ago. (Lol kidding the UN is a piece of bureaucratic dung that deserves a good flinging.)

Post Post Scriptum:

I wrote the entire of that post scriptum without even looking at a thesaurus, I think I am becoming the pretentious post-philosophic twat that I parody and laugh at so much but not-so-secretly admire.

Post³ Scriptum:

That previous paragraph was actually a lie, I had to look up a different way to say “epilogue” for the subtitle. I never knew that PS stood for Post Scriptum before, huh.

The Centralisation of the Internet

The corporatisation and centralisation of the internet is by far the greatest threat to current internet culture and content. Forget malware propagation or government legislation, there is no greater threat than this. With the recent explosion of internet usage over the last decade, the internet has become a tool and platform that everyone uses. Not just for a niche for nerds, geeks and teens; but an everyday surfing ground for anyone and everyone. There is no entry barrier, no idiot nets no nothing. This huge influx of users has brought one major asset. Money. Or at least a platform from which to make money. The precursor to this was the .com bubble of the late 90s. Businesses, mostly small, jumped on to the new biggest thing and jumped straight back of when that burst. But nowadays we have something much more sinister, corporations based around the internet. These are companies that built the current web we use everyday, pioneered innovations that we take for granted. Such as Google and the only successful search engine, or Facebook with there super-profit machine MySpace rip-off. Companies such as these make a lot of money. And with this money they can do two things. They can invest into their own projects to make them the best around; or they can buy other people's projects that are already the best around. Great, right? Now these companies will build a service that everyone can use (probably for free) and it'll be the best in the world! There's no need for alternatives when there is one, objectively best option! Hmm. Once one company, or website, has a monopoly on a market; there is virtually no incentive for smaller competition to attempt to rival them. And once nobody rivals them, there is no point for the large company to invest any further into that product, from a business perspective.

Take Youtube for example. When Youtube was a baby, it had a multitude of rival sites that had either the same, or slightly nuanced, functionality. For example, if you wanted to post animations to the net, Youtube was not the place to do it. Newgrounds maybe? And nobody in their right mind would post music there. There's SoundCloud or BandCamp for that. But over the years Youtube became the place for internet video hosting; and once it was purchased by Google, there was no turning back. Youtube is currently the second most visited site on the internet, beaten only by Google's own Google, so any competition would have to be in the multi-millions-of-dollars range to present to much as a scratch to the site's base. As for users, Youtube is really the only viable option to find an audience at any amount that will rake money. Even content that Youtube was never built for, such as music or even product selling has migrated over, just because of the huge potential audience crowded in one spot. And the more people migrate to Youtube, the less reason there will be to ever leave, thus forming a vicious circle where Google always wins. Damn even this fucking blog is built on a Google-owned framework. There is no escape from giants.

This is a pattern that can be seen throughout the internet. Whatever the type of site, there will almost invariably be a huge, conglomerate site that dwarfs and squashes any rivals out of importance. Micro-blogging with Twitter, video-games with Steam, streaming with Twitch; even the more traditional base of text-forums are being funneled into Reddit. We've seen it all before. In the real world globalisation has made starting and maintaining a small business something that relies mostly on luck and is incredibly rare to occur. Try and set up successful grocery store that can compete with any supermarket, good luck. In a sense the internet represents a totally interconnected 100% globalised market. Any site is as easy to access than any other, so why would you use for anything other than the best? And once the internet base is completely controlled by a few huge, corporate, faceless monstrosities your precious “culture” and "innovative content" will be squashed with whatever they need in order to maximise their profits. Innovation will die without its incentive; why strive to be better when there's no rival to beat? The internet will stagnate, just as globalisation has stagnated so much before.

Enforce the stupidity police! Keep out the normies! Boycott the fat cats! Nothing will work, we need to innovate fast. Make something cleverer than the huge sites, attack their weak points. Return the internet to a bastion of expression and innovation. Keep the wild west free.

Manabi Straight

Sometimes when you consume a shit tonne of the same sort of media, it becomes difficult to tell whether or not you are actually enjoying something for what it is, or just because its similar to a thing you do like. For me one of these things is SoL anime. And by SoL I don't mean the half-assed pansy shit like Kokoro Connect or any Key-shit. No. SoL doesn't really mean Slice-of-Life literally, it's its own thing. A good policy would be that if a show has more than one gender, its not SoL; and if it's guys then its gay. Except Nichibros, I liked that show. (And Cromartie) ((Wait no Cromartie's pretty gay))

Anyways, my recent experiences with SoL is that its hard to tell if a show is shit or not. A good'un is always pretty obvious, like nobody watched K-On episode 1 and thought it was nothing special. But I seem to be finding it hard to recognise when a show is truly good until a week or so after I finish it. I don't really get it. It only ever happens with media types that I consume an unholy amount of. I'll be the first to point out the flaws in any Shounen-Harem show or an FPS vidya. It's probably because I'm inherently attracted to the concept or something. I can easily blaze through a mediocre 2-cour SoL; but getting through just 12 episodes of shounen battle show is a slog no matter the show's quality. In fact. That may be the crux of the whole problem. I seem to get bored with a show much faster the more action there is. If there is no action, I'll scream through; if there's only action, I'll end up dropping before half-way. A good case study of this is Cardcaptor Sakura. I really loved the show, its been the benchmark of mahou shoujo for nearly 20 years and its animation blows most of today's stuff out the water. But it took me an age to get through, because it insisted on not only being SoL, but also action. I'm not saying action is bad. Action is cool. But so is not-action. And it just so happens that I get bored with action way faster that not-action. Maybe it drains me faster? I don't know. Oh fuck yeah this was meant to be about Manabi Straight.

Manabi Straight is a cool anime centred around cute girls in high school. But I don't care about you so if you don't know it then oh well fuck off. But the reason it's worth toalking about is that watching Manabi Straight made me the least bored I've been in ages. Usually I end up putting a show on auto-run and falling asleep around 3 episodes in. With Manabi Straught I binged straight from midnight till sunrise. And I think the reason why, is that my subconscious innately knew it was a well made show. It'd been crafted in such a way that it held my attention, made me care about the story and all the while still pandering to moe culture. I think some dick with a mic and an inflated ego could go into great depth over each scene individually and how well its made, but as a consumer I don't give a shit. I can just feel that it works, everything clicks together. The plot never gets too big, meaning all the loose ends are tied up at the end. There are 5 (five) main characters, the optimum amount to give each an in-depth development arc but not to be too smushed in to one another. The character's personalities aren't overly anime, and are grounded in some sensible realm (except for Manabi's) without going and being all “realistic” and just removing the reason why people find fictional characters fun in the first place. The list goes on. But the overarching problem here is that I don't actually know. Unlike other favourites where I can give conclusive reasoning behind my ratings, with this one I can't put my finger on it. At the time of writing its been 3 weeks since I finished it, and I still would rank it among my tops, so I doubt its just a matter of the post-binge wankfan. Bringing this sprawl back to the start, I think my love for this show is just that its a really good version of a formula that I love. Its a high school SoL that stands out from the crowd, if only for being sufficiently proficient in every area I notice or care about. And of course the weird funky aesthetic design choices are a huge plus for me; being an arthouse-fag.

Cool all around with a hint of spice.

The Hierarchy of Study

-I'm sorry arts, I love you really.

All through secondary kids around the world are forced to study an array of nonsensical, boing and useless subjects to “widen their horizons” or some bullcrap. Being a (normal) school kid I was downright angry how they forced all this useless shit down my throat everyday for years. Religious Study? Really? And don't get me started on fucking Drama. Thankfully I was a gay nerd who was actually good at science and the real subjects. So naturally I hated all this poncy side-work I had to do, and naturally the progression was to reaffirm my suspicions through my innate autism. Stats and charts. So here it is. The fully remastered Hierarchy of Study:

Subjects here are sorted into this tree thing, as well as being sorted into horizontal tiers. The links show when a subject is merely a subsection of the one above. The tiers are sorted from elderberry tier at the top, down through neck yourself tier to Floor Tiles tier right at the bottom. Lets start from the real trash. Arts: fuck you. Art should be a pastime or a passion, not something to learn about in a class. Do you think real art men went to school? I mean they did but they didn't need to, probably. Next.

Humanities. More like cuckmanities am I right? Its all just learning about stuff humans do, and not actually doing it. History might be cool to learn and parrot off to your friends like some kind of grimy wikipedia gnome, but what is it really good for? We literally know this stuff already, we did it. Languages are also shit. English is the ultimate language and luckily you already know it, so just stop.

Now this one is possibly tenuous. I've stuck very one of the aforementioned subjects as subsections of “psychology”. Which is possibly dumb, I don't know, I never did psychology. Next one.

Psychology is the study of human minds, Biology is the study of life. The human mind is just a small section of life. This one makes perfect sense. Biology is kind of useful I guess, but I've never met a medicine student I liked so there.

Chemistry is studying chemicals and their reactions. Biology is just chemistry that happens to make life. Simple.

Again, an easy one. Chemistry is just a small part of physics; which isn't just limited to the properties of chemicals, but the properties of everything that exists. Physics is the king of science, the overarching subject that includes literally everything you can see.

But again physics pales to maths. Physics is just applied maths. Maths that has an effect on real shit. Behind all physics is maths, and without maths, physics just couldn't. If physics is the king, maths is the omnipotent god that pulls the strings.

However, stuff is never that simple. I've left out one subject which doesn't really fit anywhere. That's a lie, I left out almost every subject but whatever, they don't matter. The real big one missing is philosophy. Yeah I know in real life doing a philosophy diploma is a sure fire route to the homeless shelter, but that doesn't lessen the concept of it. Really its about the big questions that even physics, and not even maths has the answers for. Literal god-tier stuff. Maths is just the parts of philosophy that work with numbers; so therefore I place philosophy right at the top. King of gods. The end.

But wait! Philosophy could also fit right at the bottom of this chart. Right down there with the dogs. Because really its just about thinking. And thinking is a mere human construction right? Just a section of what psychology covers. And thus this tree has turned into a loop. From top till bottom and back to top. I love it when a good circle appears. I'm sure this symbolises something, and I'm probably the only person who could work out what that thing is. But dammit I'm going to bed.

A Diatribe on Objectivity

The most meaningless point someone can use in an argument is one claiming “objectively”. Stating that something is objectively true, objectively false or objectively objective. Opinions can't be objective. Even most facts are really just opinions based on facts, and therefore are also subjective to the person. Anything idea that we think, any “fact” that we believe are and can only be seen through our own perspective, where we filter anything we hear through layers of abstraction before reaching our mind. Whether something is correct or not depends on our own, heavily biased, contextual minds. Anything we think is a product of our upbringing or even genetics. It is impossible to view something from a detached, impartial viewpoint, because even the concept of an impartial judge is based on our preconceptions of such a thing.

Context matters. It matters a lot. To look at something without its context is barely looking at it at all. Take someone else's opinion. Do you agree with it? Maybe, maybe not. But any person with intelligence wouldn't judge the person based solely on this one opinion, as if the context in which it was said, and the context of the person in question didn't matter. Here's a case study: murder. Intentional murder of another human. Surely that must be wrong? Well it all depends on context. Is the murder of a terrorist moments before he blows himself wrong? What about abortion? Euthanasia? Suicide? They are all the intentional ending of another persons life, but yet whether they are “wrong” or not is subjective.

And for this reason, I think that objectivity is not only a trap and fallacy, but also is a bad one. Nobody should strive for objectivity, personal biases are what make humans people. They literally are our personality. When you try to look at something objectively, you are disregarding everything you have learnt through your life, any prior knowledge is cast away as a bias. If a court judge looked at everything through the cold eyes of a robot, he wouldn't last too long. The context matters, and it matters a lot. Maybe it is the only thing that matters? Well that depends on your personal opinion crafted over the course of your entire life and shaped into whatever world views you currently hold. Nothing is objectively right, nothing is objectively wrong; and don't pretend it is.

The New Frontier

The late 19th century Americas were the heyday of exploration and modern day conquest. Cowboys facing off in the high noon sun, pirates swashbuckling around and doing piratey shit. Worlds where every man was looking out for himself, and himself only. Where you could do anything you wanted, and there was no long arm of the law to close in on you. While we have excessively romanticised this lifestyle in our current society, most sane people can see that life as a gun-slinging cowboy or swashbuckling pirate would be much less glamorous in real life than we like to portray it as. But what if I told you that you could live that life right now: present day, present time. And what's more, you could live it without any of those pesky side-consequences like having you're possessions stripped or being shot in the head with a block of lead. All you need is to be born somewhere decent and to own a piece of super-modern technology. A time machine. Wait, I meant a computer. Or I guess a phone if you're fine being forever pleb tier. What I'm really talking about is the good old Internet, and you should've guessed: it's the only thing I talk about!

Quoting a wise anon from /jp/, “the internet is still in it's wild west stage, and I'd like to keep it that way desu.” The capabilities of the internet are currently mostly unexplored. Every week some new web technology is revealed, and the 70s sci-fi Borg rhetoric edges ever closer to reality. Many remote corners of the internet remain lawless; the ever elusive deep web, the real hives of Nazi flat earth societies; gee, even actual pirating is a thing. It is a way to get information directly from real people, to communicate with anyone anywhere without the veil of some supreme authority. A place where any opinion is valid, and anything can be said/done without repercussions. The current internet is rife with opportunity, but also with danger. But the danger is what makes it fun. Any idiot can wander into the deepest corner of internet culture, but they'll be damned if they don't understand the language used, etiquette preached and exactly how everything works, almost like walking into a bar without knowing its run by a local drug lord. For those in the know it acts almost as a second home, somewhere to refuge from all those normies and wallow in depressing cyclical arguments.

While its cool to make comparisons pointing out the similarities, I want to throw in one, important, parallel. The wild west didn't last forever. Eventually the federalists came in and set up the rule of law, imposed taxes, stopped all that damn killing. Already we see the enormous conglomerates moving in and marking down their territory and their rules. Economic machines such as Google or Facebook, once themselves children of internet freedom, now controlling large portions of internet usage closely. When once people would visit independent forums to surf, they now flock to much more normal corporate websites. While the fringes of the cyber frontier are far from being under their authority, we're all definitely at risk. And there doesn't seem like there's much we can do but watch. Its the classic trade of freedom for safety; but do we need safety when there's nothing to fear? The internet never killed nobody, and now acts as the vanguard for free speech in an ever more controlling society. Always question authority and stand up to it, while we still have the upper hand.

Autism isn't Real???

Autism is a fraud. And even more, its a harmful and dangerous fraud. Its my belief that autism, and most other mental illnesses, are completely made up labels that we designate people with for maligned reasons. The modern concept of autism was only invented in 1943 by a Doctor Leo Kenner. Before it was invented, no child had ever been diagnosed with autism, but now, around 1 in 50 children are diagnosed with it in the US, and they're worse of for it. Simply coming up with the term is making up a problem that was never really there. My argument will be to explain how I don't believe that these types of “illnesses” are illnesses at all, and the use of them as labels is a humanitarian atrocity. [Just as a disclaimer, I use autism as a blanket term for a spectrum of mental disease labels in this post, so pipe down.]

Everybody designated as autistic are completely normal human beings. But not quite. The way that their brains are wired to deal with certain situations is different from the norm, whatever that may be. While the average person acts in one way to a certain situation, an autistic person acts in a different way. This is all there is to it. No underlying physical difference is present between the two people, just the way that their brains are wired. To “fix” autism, all you have to do is rewire the brain to the brain of a normal person. “Impossible!” I hear you sperg, “it can never be done!” Wrong. Rewiring our brains is an activity we all partake in all the time, everyday. Everything single you think of builds up new relations and connections in our minds and thus, the way we think is changed. When I think about a new idea, then that idea has become part of me. Every decision I make from now on will be influenced, if only negligibly, by this new idea; this is what it means to learn.

The way we react to social situations is no different from the way we think, in fact its the same thing. The way I react to a social situation is based solely on the connections present within my mind, and so can be influenced with the learning of new ideas. This is obvious if you think about it, as we grow up we learn the way that we should act by copying those around us, and so our entire personality is molded. Even as an adult it is very possible to change the way you think. Personalities constantly change, evolve and mold themselves around the ideas around us.

Now take this principle and use it with autism, or any other mental disease. Having one of these so called diseases is just the same as thinking in a different way, because of the way your brain is wired. If you act weird then other people are sure to tell you. Once you know this all you have to do is mimic the way other people around you act to situations. Eventually you will be great at pretending to be normal. This is a thing that happens already. “Coping with autism” is just learning to act as a normal person so well that you are indistinguishable. My argument is that this is problem solved. Once you act normal on the outside you ARE normal. The concept of being normal is based purely on outside appearances. Once you act normal, you are normal. You just cured your autism. In fact, it never existed. You just had a different way of acting, a different personality: nothing more. And as we all know, personalities are not permanent.

There is one major problem with this though. And its the way society acts to these people who have grown up with a slightly different mind. We notice patterns in the way some people are different and categorise them and label them, its just human nature. But by labelling a person with one of these labels we say that is who they are defined as, and there isn't anything they can do about it. If you do something strange and have autism then they just say: “Oh don't worry. You can't help it, you're autistic.” Oh good. I don't have to change. Its OK to be autistic and there is nothing I can do about it. My autism will never be cured.

My method of autism eradication would involve purely of the eradication of the term “autism”. People who act odd are just that, odd. If enough people tell them that then they will be like: “Oh, I don't want to be odd. I think I'll try to act like other people.” Autistic people aren't idiots, they can do this. Don't dehumanise them by saying they can't help it. And as explained above, just pretending to be normal makes you normal. I can draw a parallel to labelling somebody as a “racist”. You wouldn't be like: “Oh don't worry. You can't help it, you're a racist.” That's dumb. No, you'd tell them they're an idiot and the way they think is wrong and they need to change it. This is the same as my argument against mental illnesses. The labelling of small children as different or somehow broken is a horrific practise that has to stop. Once they've put you on the autism register they'll never remove you. Anything you achieve will always be “despite your autism.” You will never be accepted into society, and they have the gall to think they're helping you. The systematic segregation of people from birth into categories has to stop. Special privileges should never be given to entire groups and the sooner we see that this doesn't work the better. Let people decide who they want to be for themselves and you might just find that potential autists decide to just be what they are, humans.