Thought's on Trump's Victory

     I write these posts a day in advance, and I think I needed a day to just process everything. You know, I'm sure, that I didn't vote this time, and if you want to smite me, I welcome it. Even living in a liberal state where Harris won by a wide margin, it still feels like it's my fault. Maybe it is, I don't know. 

    I don't have any positive or upbeat messages. I'm not that kind of person. I'm also not going to sit here listing every organization you should join/build to try and undo the damage. I was never that kind of leftist. What I am going to offer is an observation or two. 

     First, I'm going to admit that most of what I'm feeling right now is relief. I've been feeling so disillusioned for so long that in a way this result feels like validation for all of the anger and sadness I've felt. I know, it would be better if I was feeling numb or sad, something to indicate I felt anything towards the people who have just lost everything.

    Secondly, I'm going to fight in whatever way that I can. We all are. I know that everyone reading this and most of the people who aren't reading this are going to fight like hell for the world they're about to lose. We're going to fight for ourselves, for each other, for the little bird called hope who seems so helpless without us. That's good, and important. But we will lose steam at some points. We aren't fighting some made up ideology, we're fighting people who believe things for their own reasons. They're garbage reasons, but who among us doesn't have something we believe in for completely made up reasons? 

     Thirdly, our world's going to change. We're going to lose things that are important to us and most of the fighting will be to try and get them back. We probably won't get them back. Not in the form that we had them in. Trust will be broken, people will be hurt, we'll find ourselves wondering if any of this was real. There won't be some grand moment of victory when we stand, golden and glowing, on a world we love and remember. All there will be are moments of sadness when we realize something we know is gone, probably forever. 

     Finally, let me tell you a story. In 2022, when I was first starting to blog, I was falling victim to a delusion of my own choosing. There was a famous music producer who was selling NFTs at the time. Not wanting to support him but not wanting to let go of music I genuinely loved, I rebelled. I got angry. I did everything except anything that should have had an effect. And yet, eventually, his NFT store went offline. It ended. And I will forever wonder if I, somehow, had an impact. 

     There are a million ways to read that, but my personal takeaway is that sometimes we'll win, and when we do we might feel just as bad as if we'd lost. I know that I did. I won, but nothing was the same. I still didn't trust him, I couldn't listen to his music guilt free, and I was now stuck in a vicious belief of simultaneously being convinced everything was about me and that he didn't care. I doubt it'll be that bad, but I do know for a fact that what impact, if any, we leave will be questionable. 

     Millions of people are now waking up wondering if they had any impact on the election. Did their vote matter? Last time, millions of people felt the same way, and they refused to accept it. Now they've won, and look where that got us. This is what victory looks like. It looks like broken wastelands of ash and dust, skies blocked out by smoke, people wandering around wondering what the hell to do next. When this is over, most of us will wonder if we should have fought at all. I can't give you an answer. All I can say is that if you don't fight, you'll spend the rest of your life wondering why you didn't. 

       Let me conclude with this observation; reality should be able to withstand you having a negative opinion about it, even if your right. That most of the people fighting for Kamala Harris couldn't bring up her negative points was a bad sign. Our reality can't withstand negativity anymore, it's being stretched too many different directions. That can work to our advantage now. So go forth and complain, fight like hell for your friends, neighbors, and that cute little restaurant you don't want to lose. Be as selfish as you can, and when this is over picture a world built on the things that you believe in. Because from now on we live in a world that's only real so long as we believe it exists. 

Political Rant

     I can't believe that the Washington Post isn't endorsing anyone. I know that I'm not voting, and I've talked about that a lot, but I don't think I have the same impact as the Washington Post would have. Also, pretty much everyone agrees this was just because they don't want to suffer any backlash for endorsing Kamala Harris if Trump wins. Except that no one wants him to win. I hate the concept of being stuck in a country where a party always wins because the other option is to accept the existence of the Infinite. I reject that future on principle.

    My feeling is that if you're not willing to do anything to protect people from the Infinite because you expect the people to do most of the work for you, you're not worth my time. Only it's not just the government that's not doing anything to protect people from the Infinite. Even a lot of the people going to bat against Trump are only doing that because they're terrified of him winning. But I didn't see the Democrats do a whole lot to protect us. 

     I'm a Leftist. I've seen people fight fascism ever since Trump was elected. People have been fighting this for years, begging for people to see the truth and do more. When the rest of the establishment finally realizes that we crossed the point of no return years ago, it'll be too little too late. 

My Problem With the Democratic Party

     Full disclosure: I'm not voting in the next election. I find it hard to believe that my vote will fix anything when both presidents have shown themselves to be pro-genocide. That said, I still think people should vote next election. I'm not voting because I have no better way of saying that no one in our government represents me or my interests. The people who aren't in that position should absolutely vote, because if they don't our world won't know how many people the system still represents. 

     That being said, a lot of people are in the same position that I'm in; historically oppressed groups who have been voting Democrat because it was the only way they had a chance of being heard. All we've been given in the past four years amounts to lip service at best, and since nothing's been done to curb the loss of human rights it's fair to say that we've suffered a net loss. What has the Democratic party done to combat this? Nothing. When you drive down Bellevue Streets, you see plenty of signs for Republicans, but not a single Democrat. Despite the fact that the Democrats reputation is in the toilet. It was under Biden's watch that a genocide happened and millions of Palestinians were displaced and killed. What did the Democrats do? They pushed through more funding to Israel. Whether they're desperate for campaign money or just extremely racist and evil, I don't know and I honestly don't care. 

     The fact of the matter is that Trump made the Democrats complacent. They won by such a large margin in 2020 that they're now convinced that they can't lose no matter how much they screw up. In doing so, they're leaving people with no choice but to see a world where Republicans will one day push down the barricade between our world and the Infinite because not only will the Democrats do nothing to stop them, they'll give them grenades if given enough campaign money. I have no idea what makes a Democracy healthy, but I simply refuse to believe that it's a world of people who are disillusioned, disempowered, and bitter with the whole charade. At this point we have two options; push for a system that will make our current system look as authoritarian as absolute monarchies do to us, or accept our fate and step forward into a world where we have no power at all. 

End of May Reflections

     It's almost the end of May. As far as month's go, it's been relatively pleasant. You know, aside from the whole "Ongoing Genocide in Gaza" issue. The fact that Israel is now explicitly killing people for no reason and it still isn't enough for American politicians to consider pulling support for Israel is a damning indictment of our political system, but we'll just have to wait until November to see how that plays out. Got to give them credit though, people were wanting a world where Democrats and Republicans were equally worthy political candidates and they just gave it to us. Now we just need to admit that to ourselves so we can demand that they stop being genocidal maniacs and start being politicians again. Or just skip straight to the part where we order the guillotines. 

    Being an Infinitelist, I have strong opinions on how our world should work going forward, but one thing I think all of us can get behind is that we need to commit to our world's existence in order for our world to have any sort of future. We need to admit that our world just isn't working anymore, for anyone, and things need to change. We need to accept that the future we dream about, the kind of future so perfect it'll last forever without our help, doesn't exist. We can't even pretend that it did exist at one point. There are a lot of things we need to do, but I think the only way to start is admitting that our future depends on us being willing to stop participating in this society so we can focus on building the next one. 

Gut Reaction: A Rant

     Quick summary before we start, because I'm willing to bet not a lot of people have read this book yet. Gut Reaction, by Kirby Larson and Quinn Wyatt, is a story about a thirteen-year-old who has just moved to a new school and is trying to balance making friends with schoolwork and her passion for baking. The book focuses on her working to win a baking competition with the help of her new friends. But there's a catch, one that's supposed to be a shock but if you know about this novel at all, odds are you already know what it is because it's in all the marketing material; she has Crohn's, and has yet to figure out how to manage her condition. After being diagnosed, she becomes determined to prove that her disease does not hold her back and (spoilers) gets all the way to the finals of the baking competition she joined. 

      Overall, this book is just boring. A lot of the reviews for this book say that this book is better if you're familiar with baking, but what they mean by that is that unless you're looking for a book specifically about either bakers or kids with Crohn's, this book isn't for you. Which, frankly is my biggest problem with the book; there just isn't anything interesting in it. Every problem has a simple solution, all of the people are nice (including the main character's step-father), and despite this being a story about how Crohn's doesn't have to stop you from living a normal life her disease is easily her biggest opponent in the novel, which I feel undercuts the message a tad. Honestly, I could forgive all of that. Were it not for the Language Art's teacher. 

    I'm willing to bet that a lot of you had a Language Arts teacher who was tragically awful at their job. I had one, and I only went to middle school for three months before my mother pulled me out and homeschooled me. That's what this woman is; she wears schlocky jewelry, only teaches from classic novels, and doesn't let her students use the bathroom during class. If you're like me, you expected that to come up again, especially since the main character worries about this specifically and a huge plot point is that she can't get anything above a C-minus in her Language Arts class. If you're like me, and waiting eagerly for them to but heads over this, you're going to be gravely disappointed because once the main character gets diagnosed, her Language Arts teacher never gets brought up again. At all. The class does, and we get a brief scene with one of the girls who also butted heads with the teacher, and we see the essay the main character wrote that finally got an A+, but that's it. No dramatic moment when the main character rushes to the bathroom and the two get in a screaming match, no discussion between the main character or the main character's mother about why she has to be allowed to use the bathroom during class, no moment where the teacher tells the main character that she got a note from her mother about needing to be allowed to use the bathroom in class if she asks. 

      I've mentioned this before, but for those who are new, I'm Autistic, and one of my issues is that my handwriting is illegible unless I write really slowly. So once computers were cheap enough, I used one for my classwork and from the time I entered High School, and a class where I had to take notes, I've always used a laptop in class. As such, I'm familiar with both needing accommodations and the fear of a teacher telling you that you aren't allowed to have them for bullshit reasons. As such, I was waiting to see how this book would tackle the topic of suddenly needing an exemption from your teachers ironclad rules. Lack of accommodations is part of the reason I got pulled out of middle school, and I have had to tell teachers they couldn't force me to not use my laptop even as far in as college. But the thing is, most teachers were just fine with letting me use a laptop, and the one time one of them wasn't, it got resolved the next day. So a book like this, without a lot of conflict and people who are genuinely understanding of someone's illness, is the perfect place to help kids who are sick/disabled see that there's nothing wrong with telling your teacher that you need something the other students don't have. Especially since the Language Art's teacher was a bit of a bitch, so the main character would have every reason to worry about being denied. As someone who to this day worries about entering new places because she's afraid of how people will react to finding out she needs extra help, this feels like an important message to give not only disabled kids, but everyone; don't worry about people judging you for needing help, worry about what happens if you don't get it.

     Yeah, I'm annoyed that a book didn't give me one scene I can imagine happened offscreen, but when you set up that a teacher doesn't allow bathroom breaks in her first appearance, I expect that to pay off at some point before the novel concludes. Especially when you only need to mention it happening for it to pay off. Doubly so when your book has no purpose for existing other than as a gift for people who know kids who were just diagnosed with Crohn's. No lie, if this had paid off the way that I wanted it to, I feel like this book could have been just a little bit meaningful. The kind of meaning not a lot of kids get. Instead, it was just left by the wayside, and I get that it was probably between this one scene and paying off the baking competition, but I'm still disappointed. Mostly because I made the mistake of reading this book as someone who had no interest in baking and, as far as I know, doesn't have Crohn's. 

     On the whole, this book isn't bad, this is just one thing that bugs me specifically. I'm not even going to pretend that fixing this one problem would have fixed it, because I think this book isn't very well written. It's okay. Does the bare minimum, has a gimmick, that's it. So yeah, the reviewers were mostly right; if you're a middle schooler with Crohn's and a passion for baking, this book is for you. Otherwise, don't bother.

Thoughts on Power

     Ever since I was young, I was taught that small actions can leave a big impact, so I had to be very careful about what I did. I believe that, too. I believe that being a part of society means monitoring your small actions just as much as monitoring your big ones, just in case you hurt someone. I like to think that I’ve left a big impact with my small actions, that I’ve exerted power over the world by doing the right thing whenever I have the opportunity. I want to believe that even I, the creator of a dead end blog, can have enough power to change the world forever just through the act of living.

    Lately, I’ve been faced with a terrible question; is that enough? Is it enough to settle for a life where all I have are small successes? It’d be one thing if I couldn’t succeed, but the problem is that I don’t want to succeed, because success in a world like ours means you put yourself at risk of being exploited. Scratch that, being successful means that you are exploited, both by those above and below you. It’s one thing settling for small successes because you know you’ll never make it big, it’s another thing entirely to realize you’re settling for small success because you know that you won’t survive making it big. You know you live in a world where taking advantage of someone isn’t just common, but completely accepted, to the point where people get upset not when someone is taken advantage of, but when someone the world is supposed to care about is taken advantage of. 

      When exactly did I learn to accept that success will only make things worse? Was it in college when I kept failing class? Was it when I saw how our obsession with success made it impossible to live a normal life? Was it when I realized that our obsession with pushing things as hard as they would go was destroying our planet? Or was it when I realized our definition of success was narrow? I don’t know, and I don’t expect anyone reading this to answer. 

      I just know that success shouldn’t come with a nasty, bitter aftertaste. The taste that comes from realizing that this is your identity now; the person who did something amazing. For the rest of your life you’ll be expected to repeat that success every day, as though it wasn’t a fluke, and god help you if it wasn’t just a fluke. Every day you’ll be expected to be better, to climb higher, and even if no one expects anything from you, you’ll be so entrenched in your new reality that you’ll expect yourself to do better. It shouldn’t be like this, where success leads to a life of endless successes, and failure leads to endless failure. Failure is a whole other thing. Failure is worse than success, because we make it worse. We define what success is, what opens doors and what makes people like you, so whenever anyone can’t make it, it’s technically our fault. But whereas success only mostly ruins people’s lives, failure always leads to disaster. 

    I thought I’d be okay with a subtle form of power, one that I could go my whole life without revealing to people. But I’m not okay with living in a world where I don’t trust anyone. I want to live in a world where I can be myself and know that everyone else is okay with that. I’ve been fighting to turn our world into that world, and I’m now realizing that means a world where I can be powerful. Not wealthy, not popular, powerful. The kind of power that gets heard when it speaks. I need to live in a world where I know people won’t twist me into a form I wasn’t meant to be purely to keep a world that I hate alive. I need a world where when I’m heard, I feel proud, not scared. I need a world where I matter, because I know that it’s safe to matter. 

A Creatively Empty World

      This probably sounds insane, but I don’t think that our current world is all that creatively satisfying. Unless you’re in the top one percent of creatives, no one is going to hear you. 

     Our world demands success. The kind of success that would make Bill Gates blush. But being successful doesn’t equate being heard. A lot of successful people got to where they are by being able to effectively monetize those who could come up with the ideas, without coming up with anything of their own. Our world expects success to mean turning the world into a pretzel, ruining lives without ever getting your hands dirty in the process. It doesn’t think about people who want a world where they take as much as they give. To the people watching, the world is either a place where you give all you have or take all you can. 

      Looking at YouTube, I can’t help but think about everyone who wants a solidly small audience of people who all share their opinions and have things to add to the stupid conversations they want to have. People like me, in other words. Solidly unimportant individuals who want to be their own version of failure. I think about those who have singularly bad artistic visions who want to share their art anyway because it’s silly. And yes, in a lot of cases it runs the gamut of stupid at best and problematic at worst, but sometimes you find someone who’s come up with something incredible no one has thought to try. They wind up inspiring someone else who can build on that idea and make it into something not great, but a little better, and over time that idea becomes something that changes the world. I’m not sure if that’s worth the mountains of hate speech and misinformation that YouTube is responsible for, but I know that it is worth giving up a world where every book is expected to be the next Hunger Games. 

     To the people in charge of the platforms we post things on, I have something to say. Don’t build our world in terms of view count. If it isn’t financially feasible to build a version of Facebook where we can spend time with communities of people enough like us to be friendly but enough unlike us to spot our faults, than Facebook shouldn’t exist. This goes both ways, if we can’t be on social media without becoming worse versions of ourselves, than we probably shouldn’t be online. 

      I think it’s worth asking; what do the people in charge of our world want out of our future? I’m not the first to ask that question, nor will I be the last, because the best you can say about those in charge is that they have no plan other than to make money. Our world is full of people who, if they were in charge, would take it in a direction that would allow for a more creatively fulfilling existence for them, for better and for worse. The people we have in charge now don’t seem to care about creativity at all. They only care about reenforcing a narrative that was old when my mother was a child. I don’t think that we should expect our leaders to be the only ones in charge of writing our world’s story, and while I’m glad that they’re no longer the only one’s with the privilege, we’re dangerously close to losing the one good thing I think the future gave us. 

      I feel like we, the audience of the world, owe it to our creators to expect them to be a bit silly sometimes. To say things that don’t land, to do things that make no sense, to write stories only they thought would be interesting. What we should hold them accountable for isn’t disappointing us, it’s creating things that we know could make the world worse if people decide to build on those ideas, the way the Twilight series was indirectly responsible for the Fifty Shades of Grey series. I think we also owe it to our favorite authors to genuinely build off of their better ideas, through fanfiction and things like that, and to build our own stories and worlds based on what we like. I may be projecting, but I think that inside of every audience member is a writer of some sort, yearning to write their own story. I also think the best stories are the ones that no one is responsible for, because they’ve been retold so often no one even knows who created them in the first place. We owe it to our world to retain the right to say what’s on our minds and to expect someone who agrees with us to be able to hear it. We’ve reached the point where our society is now sound enough to protect us from the Infinite, I think we should be able to create a world where people can be as crazy as they want to be without worrying about destroying the world they were born in. 

Imaginary Conversations with Imaginary Critics

     One of the things I believe about Dreamworlds is that they should be built to withstand criticism. Not ignore it, not resist it, but instead take it and try and build around the problems people have with it even if they’re minor ones. I know, most Dreamers figure this out early on, or else they wind up getting hounded out by everyone else. 

     As a blogger with an audience generously measured in the single digits (although it seems to be growing) I don’t face criticism for my writing that often. Which I’m okay with, considering that my delusion of choice is that I’m an amazing yet undiscovered writer. As someone who believes in a world made by herself for herself, I do wonder whether or not there’s some sort of issue I haven’t thought of. Something that makes it impossible to believe in both my preferred philosophy and the reality in which we live. You know how with most conspiracy theories, you find that you can only believe in them if you choose not to believe in anything else? I’m trying to avoid that, since the whole reason I created this was that I was a science nerd who desperately wanted to believe in some sort of all-powerful being. Which, of course, eventually led me to deciding in some sort of super sentient Universe trying to keep itself together as best it can. Hey, it works for me. 

      The thing about being any sort of religious wacko, especially if you essentially live in a cult of one, is you wind up thinking you hold some sort of key to understanding the Universe. What I see is real and makes sense to me, so it must also make sense to everyone else as well, right? Not helped if you believe in something so hidden that our Universe is trying to protect us from it, so it’s not only unfalsifiable but the smaller the number of believers, the more convincing your ideology seems to be. Put like that, the chances of it becoming mainstream are nonexistent. Hell, I’m convinced that someone will eventually figure out a way to prove that it’s wrong. I’m pretty smart, but I was never the best at physics. I’m okay with that, not in an “I’ve made peace with it” way, but in an “I’m smart enough to figure out that if this were true we’d be in danger” way. That’s why I write about it so much, I’m certain that it’s true and I’m pretty sure even a casual observer can tell that most of us live as though it is true. Most of psychology is devoted to the idea that most of what we see isn’t real, it’s just an approximation, and most modern literature is about how we use stories to make life simpler and more exciting. In such an environment, I find the fact that we don’t take the subject of fantasy seriously to be maddening. What we believe and why will be the thing that forms our future, we need to be talking about it a lot more than we are. 

      I won’t act like I believe in only reasonable things that can be backed by proof. For example, I believe that influence always goes both ways, even in situations where that shouldn’t physically be possible. So every time your favorite creator changes your mind, you’re also changing them in some way even if you can’t see it. Sometimes it’s an exchange, sometimes an enhancement of something both of you already believed, sometimes something else, but the influence is always there. 

       I know that I don’t have an audience, but even if I did I feel like I wouldn’t be criticized all that much because there isn’t a lot to criticize. There’s a lot of ideas and words, but not a lot of clear explanation because I never explain this to anyone. No one in my life knows that I believe in most of this. I wish I could discuss this with someone, but I have a deep dark suspicion that people would just think that I’m crazy. Why wouldn’t they? I believe in something so unreal that I believe our reality was built to protect us from it. I don’t even think that an external reality that exists regardless of what we do is real. I believe in an innate consciousness shared by everything in the world because I think the only thing keeping our world together is that everything in our Universe believes in our Universe and is following its rules. How much crazier can you get? Let’s also not overlook the fact that a philosophy designed to build realities is a huge danger to the world. Just imagine what kind of trouble we could get into if someone like Donald Trump found out about this. 

     I’m in a weird position. As the one person who believes in this particular set of beliefs (that I know of, and I know a lot of people believe in parts of this), I simultaneously want everyone to know about this and am worried about what will happen when someone who isn’t me finds out about this. Will they laugh? Get Angry? Steal my ideas and build a cult? What if someone decides that I am building a cult? What if it turns out that I am building a cult? Do cult leaders know what they’re doing? How do they find out before it’s too late? No one talks about this much. In our world you either join a religion or you become an atheist of some sort. Only bad people try and build their own belief system to explain what goes on in their lives. 

      Maybe that can be your takeaway from this blog. I don’t want Infinitelism to be the end point anyway, and I’m certain that most people want something more solid than the idea that there’s something out there that science can’t explain. I did. So I made that something. Maybe you can to. I’m not the only one who knows that we need something to believe in. I think it’s time we move past prophets, and into a world of people who are just trying to figure out what reality looks like to the little creatures who are trapped in its embrace. 

Requests of the Unreasonable

    I hope that I don’t need to say this, but I need to start by reminding everyone that we don’t live in the same reality. Most of us are lucky enough to live in a reality that overlaps with everyone we meet. All of us overlap at least a little bit. We may not agree on the difference between good and evil, but we all agree the sky is blue, and when you jump up, you’ll go back down. It’s what we don’t agree on that’s problematic. What’s good, what’s bad, where to draw the line. Our world is shaped by disagreements, by people saying that they don’t think something is right. A good thing, a bad thing, but mostly a thing that haunts us and the worlds we make.

      Our world is currently defined by extremism, but those who can’t live in our society’s, or who simply don’t want to. People like me, different on many levels, ignored by everyone for the sake of convenience. Many of the people in our society wants a world where those who can’t, or don’t want to, live in in its boundaries simply leave and go somewhere else, but that’s not feasible anymore. There’s no wild land left, countries are bound by similar rules, and even places without laws aren’t safe from pollution and warfare. It also doesn’t help that those who live in society rarely fare better than those who leave. As someone who avoids society as best she can, I find it horrifying that those who live within it, who follow its rules and sing its praises, routinely complain about the issues that keep me from wanting to join. Am I wrong in feeling on some level that if I was being punished for not following the rules, this would be better? I don’t like the feeling that even if I lived in this world, nobody would care.

      I can’t help but wonder if things wouldn’t be better if the extremists got their way. Evil would be in society, but we could at least see what we were fighting and not hold back until we got rid of it at its source. As it is, we know that our world is unwelcoming and its people unhappy, but nobody is quite sure why. I think that we all know that if extremism did make its way into our worlds core, all that would happen is that we would fight to bury it again, and then not do anything to make sure it was actually gone. I’m also very aware that the extremists are no better at building worlds than the moderates are, meaning the best we can hope for is a world that’s just as bad as what we have now.

      Still, I can’t help but dream of a world that suits me, that I can just live in without difficulty. This world just doesn’t make any sense to me at all, and whenever I try to live in it I keep running into walls. Between autism, anxiety, and a strong sense of doom, it’s reached the point where it’s been years since I tried in any meaningful way. I’m well aware that I’m lucky to have someone who can support me, and that my luck will run out, but the answer to my problems is not trying to go back to college or getting a job at a grocery store. I’ve made peace with the fact that my options are either starving to death or destroying my mental health, which will likely lead to me starving to death as well. Which is something a lot of people just don’t get; dealing with people I don’t know often isn’t safe for someone like me, and it’s increasingly becoming dangerous even if you’re what our world calls normal.

     I think what I want more than anything is for our world to stop trying to be reasonable and try to look at us as beings who feel a lot more than we thing, beings for whom a world based even superficially on logic just won’t work. Religion, belief, insanity, everything that we say divides us and makes us more vulnerable, all of this and more are things that will stay with us forever. On purpose. We were built to be unreasonable, because the act of living, of being in a form you know is temporary, is the kind of thing only unreasonable beings would do. You can’t solve extremism by being reasonable or understanding. The people who feel slighted will only listen if they believe that you feel as they do.

More Thoughts on AI

    I think that by this point we can all agree that “AI” is something of a bust. It could be just that it’s early days, but I feel like the tech people shoved the idea out the door long before it was ready. Most people know it’s not even an innovation, it’s just repackaging something people already didn’t like. I think that the biggest failure of AI doesn’t even have to do with the tech itself, it has to do with how it was marketed to capitalists. From the start of this tech bubble, the people in charge of marketing this have acted like this will replace humanity, right down to invoking a tech apocalypse where the tech becomes so smart that it decides that it doesn’t need us anymore. Why they thought that was a good idea, I don’t know, but at this point I think it’s safe to say that no one is looking for something to replace humanity. If we can’t work, the economy is kind of shot, and I’m pretty sure that an AI smart enough to replace us is smart enough to realize that ruling over a world is worth nothing if you have nothing to rule over. What I think people want is AI that’s capable of surpassing humanity. They want a machine capable of leading them.

      Considering the state of our government, it’s not hard to see why. Power in the United States divided between the government, who we elect, and the businesspeople, who we don’t. We’re seeing why a world where half our power is contained within positions that we can’t change if something goes wrong is a bad idea, not least because it makes it harder for us to get rid of elected leaders who are doing a bad job. It’s at moments like this that insane courses of action start to seem reasonable, in part because they feel like the only thing that will do any good. Any minor changes result in a world that, looked at up close, is exactly like what we have now. It takes time to see the effects of change, and humans aren’t good at thinking long term. 

      I don’t think that AI designed to lead us is a good idea, but even I can see the appeal. The biggest problem facing our world is that everything is in pieces. I’m not just talking about politics, but academics, nationality, culture, just about everything. There is something incredible about living in a world where you can have a group tailored to your exact personality, but the price of that is you can go your entire life without realizing your world isn’t real, so long as you don’t interact with anyone outside of your group. To an extent, this was also true in the path, but because groups were both smaller and built out of random chance, it was easier to build meaningful connections with people and you could live your entire life without seeing that it was all a lie. Now, the only way to keep your world real is to deny that anything outside of it is real, unless you devote your entire life to learning how to build a reality. Most of us can’t do that. I’ve tried, but there’s too much for me to keep track of. We need better tools to help us figure out exactly what people will accept, because even groups are full of people with contradicting interests. I’m just not sure if this is the answer, and even if it was I don’t trust the people in charge to implement it properly. 

      Frankly, I have my doubts that AI will become what we want it to be, and it comes down to the problems we’re seeing now. AI is infamous for having “Hallucinations”, caused by them learning incorrect patterns, and I distinctly remember reading stories where models claimed they weren’t making anything up. They point to what I think the real problem with AI is; it can’t see reality. Neither can we, but we interact with it on a daily basis, whereas the models only interact with the reality we feed into it piece at a time. I think it’s reasonable to say that in order to build a machine capable of interacting with reality, we first need to understand reality, and reality is made of so many moving parts that we won’t have an easy time doing that. It feels more likely that AI will become a series of tools made to help us interpret data, and not much else. Until we learn how we protect ourselves from the Infinite, I don’t think these new tools will do us much good. 

Denial

     I think that our world is in denial. I don’t mean a world, I mean the world. I’ll be specifically referring to the United States, since that’s where I’ve lived for my entire life, but I suspect this is an issue that stretches worldwide, across the developed world at least. I also won’t be naming any particular examples, because I don’t think this is an issue I can convince anyone is real. Maybe someday I’ll find someone with the right terminology to explain, but for now I’ll just describe what I see as best I can. 

     I think the best place to start is in 2021, when we thought the pandemic was going to end but it actually wouldn’t officially end for another year. I distinctly remember a conversation with my mother where she insisted that after the pandemic was over, we’d go back to normal and everyone would forget all about Covid-19. I said that wouldn’t happen. We’d seen our world stop being real for an entire year, we couldn’t go back because every minute spent walking in that world would be spent waiting for it to collapse. I didn’t mention this to her, I just said I didn’t think we could go back. She disagreed. Three years on, I think that it’s safe to say that I’m right. We keep trying to go back, but nobody wants to go and every attempt is met with pushback. I think that if our leaders had made any attempt to make it feel like things were changing, we’d be able to accept this new world. But they’re not. They’re pretending that it’s still 2019, not 2024. 

      Somewhere along the way, the denial of our world’s death in 2020 became the bedrock of other, deeper denials. Chief among them the denial of a plague I don’t think anyone but me is noticing. I can’t point to anything in specific, but I get a strong sense that many people, regardless of political or religious affiliation, no longer believe that our world is real. It’s not a new thing, conspiracies have a history going back to the beginning of time practically, but we didn’t live in a world where social media was owned by people who were complicit, or even actively peddling them. This goes a little bit deeper. It goes to a world that’s seen our leaders deny that covid’s still a threat, people push for a world where obvious cons were peddled as a new way to form a reality, and where AI is making it possible for anyone to make an image depicting anything they want. Even those who don’t think the way that I do are being tormented by a sense that something isn’t right. Physics is still there, but the world they see in the media doesn’t quite match with what they see on the internet, and at this point everyone knows that could be either because the media is lying to them or because they’ve somehow ended up in an bubble of some sort. Unless you have a degree in media literacy, it’s impossible to tell, even if you know that someone is lying to you. You could go to the most trusted news source you can think of and still not be certain that someone isn’t pulling strings somewhere between where the news enters the machine and when it reaches your eyes. It’s a wonderful environment if you want to convince everyone to hate one another. 

     I don’t think it matters if physics falls apart or not. Even if you aren’t an Infinitelist, you can tell that reality is crumbling and the people who are supposed to protect us are either too weak to do anything or to insulated from consequence to care. I don’t think anyone is in denial of that. What I think they are denying is that our old world didn’t stop being real overnight. It was real because it gave us what we wanted, most of the time at least. It might not have given all of us grand mansions, but it gave us a nice place to live. It was good enough, and that’s all most of us wanted. Then it stopped being good enough, and it’s clear that it will never be good enough again. I keep seeing people pushing for a world based more on what’s real, but what they keep missing is that our old world wasn’t based on reality at all, but it was still enough to keep us happy. That’s what we need to keep in mind. Our new world might just be enough for us, but even if it isn’t run by despots, it’ll never quite be a real place. 

A Cry of Defiance

     Someday I'll figure out what parts of me are safe for public consumption, but for now all I can seem to manage is, "It's gray outside, and the mood of the world is grim." For now, all I can do is write and hope that ideas come to me. I'm told it gets easier, but at the moment I'm not sure. I'm so tired. Just living feels exhausting right now, and I'm not even one of those people who works every day. How is everyone else able to handle it? Are they just living without being alive? I hope I never figure that out, and for their sakes I hope things get better. 

      It seems almost mean to point out how horrible things are, especially when you know that you have nothing to add. For me, this isn’t an act of addition or subtraction, it’s an act of defiance, an act of telling the world that even when it destroys any and all acts of creativity, I will keep writing. I will keep writing until I physically lose the ability to write, and even than I’ll just keep writing stories in my mind. I will write so long as defiance blooms in my heart, just as everyone will keep living so long as their lungs draw breath. In a world where most things will never know life, living is an act of defiance. Dreaming is an act of defiance. Believing our world can be better is an act of defiance. 

      So long as I live in this world I will suffer. Most of us have been forced to accept that. Having realized this, I’ve decided that I can either submit to a world where I’ll be neither safe nor happy, or I can turn into a person this world will never love. Not that it would love me even if I turned myself into its slave. 

      I’m a person who dreams of the impossible because the things this world expects you to want are insultingly superficial. Clothes, but nothing that will last or be comfortable, instead you’re supposed to get something you can wear all of one time to impress strangers who don’t actually care about you. Accessories? Perhaps, but nothing that says anything about you, only something that tells the world that you have something approaching status and power. Your title is supposed to say what you got that power for. I will never have a title, or lands, or a name in this world beyond the one I was given at birth. I can’t afford to be different than who I am now, this world has seen to it, and it won’t even let me dream of the things that would let me be the person I badly want to be. It insists that everyone dreams of being a very specific form of rich person; the kind that has all the money they could want but absolutely no personality. You see them all over, people who surround themselves with others they pay to do the thinking for them because any time they think, things in their general orbit tend to catch on fire. The worst part is, you have to let the person paying think that they’re smart, because the world insists that rich people got their power legitimately even though that isn’t true. You could be the most deserving person in the world, but wealth will still only be given to you through chance. The dream of wealth exists only because without it, our world would cease to be real. 

      I’m tired of living in this world. I hate the idea that I’m only supposed to do what I do if I can figure out how to turn it into a boon for the rest of humanity. I hate the rest of humanity. It’s full of people I can only think are willfully stupid, people who are so terrified of not being right they refuse to see what’s right in front of their faces. I may be wrong about a lot of things, but I’d rather be wrong than a member of the living dead. That’s what I would be if my right to dream was taken from me, either by those above me or by those below. I don’t care what anyone says, I’m a Dreamer and that’s that. I will dream of whatever I want whenever I want to, because if there’s one thing this world can’t take away from me it’s the idea that somewhere it’s still possible to make your dreams come true. I may be crazy for believing this, but I’ll believe it regardless, because if I stop believing in it than I may as well die. 

Transitions

    Back when I was a kid, Rhee and I used to drive down to California to visit my relatives once a year, on average. There was a point where we only went every other year, later on we went twice a year, so it averaged out to about once a year. One part that sticks out to me about those trips is the stretch of I-5 that goes over Mt. Shasta. Green, mountainous, but mostly unremarkable excepting the number of brake test areas and runaway truck ramps. I think the reason I remember it so vividly is that to my younger self it was the point where we transitioned from Oregon, which felt friendly and familiar, into California, which was not only large but strange and alien to me. It had different environments, a lot more people, and was much more important that Washington was at that time. The Tech industry didn’t dominate Washington the way it does today, and Washington doesn’t have nearly as many people. 

    When I think back to my childhood, most of what I remember is comprised of transitions. I remember when I graduated from middle school because everyone knew it would be a huge deal, so that moment stood out in my mind. I remember when I went to college, because the transition from high school to college was, and still is, one of the most important moments in the standard cultural narrative. I remember summer as the time between one stage and the next. That changed on the fall 2014, when I realized I would have to repeat a class that wouldn’t be available until the fall of next year, and I wouldn’t be able to graduate on time. That was when the transitions stopped meaning as much to me. 

      Ever since then, life has progressed slowly and rather unevenly, with a lot of me going “backwards” relative to the rest of the world. Because of this, until recently I operated as though I hadn’t changed since I turned eighteen. I’ve come to realize that my life has changed, and my opinions aren’t what they used to be either. I hesitate to say that I’ve grown though. I’ve felt for a long time that personal growth is something of a myth. We learn things, and we change, but I don’t feel that we necessarily become better or worse with time. We just pretend we do so that we can pretend that time makes us better. 

     I’d like to think that I’m a better person now than I was a decade ago. I’d like to think that I’ve grown up a little, learned a little more, become someone I couldn’t have imagined I’d be back then. I also know that I’m still waiting for the moment I know who I’m “Supposed” to be, the moment I thought I’d reached back then but began to realize that wasn’t the case. I always knew I wanted to write, to share myself with the world, but the world insisted that was a bad idea. It’s what I’m doing right now, and no one cares about what I have to say. They’re too busy focusing on their own problems to worry about mine. 

    Maybe grade school got me into the habit of waiting for the next big moment of my life, the moment when I knew I was ready for the next step. I lived in our world for so long, I’d come to expect that there would be a place for me, even when there wasn’t. Now I’m trying to make a place for myself. Sort of. 

     I feel like I had a point to make about the importance of the big moments in our lives, but if I did it got buried in a lot of musings on who I am as a person. This is part of the reason I’m grateful it’s become clear I won’t find an audience. I can just be myself and not worry about anyone getting angry at me. I know that I have flaws, and if I was a better person I’d work on fixing them, but I’ve always felt the world should be willing to let me not live in it if I don’t want to. That way I can retain my personality without making anybody miserable. But they keep insisting that not only do I have to live with other people, but my life will only get better if I keep trying. I don’t believe them, but until we figure out a way to let people live by themselves, I don’t think I have a choice. 

A Dream House

     I’ll never forget the day my Grandfather died. My mother and I were on our way to California to visit him, and we were somewhere in Oregon if memory serves. We heard the phone ring, and I remember picking it up to answer. I don’t remember what my cousin said to me that day, all I remember is the urgency, and Rhee pulling over into a Rest stop to answer. That’s when we heard. It wasn’t unexpected, he’d been battling health issues for some time, and had been depressed for decades. It had also been a little over a year since my Grandmother died. Without her, he pretty much had no one. He couldn’t walk very far, had to be on oxygen, minimal contact with anyone who wasn’t his family. He was also the kind of person who a total stranger would find interesting, but someone close to would find despicable. His children loved him, but did not like him, and I straight up hated him. I don’t want to say that I was excited for his death, but I thought it would alleviate all my problems if I didn’t have to see him every Christmas and summer. 

     My grandfather left us enough money to buy a house, and since we lived in housing owned by the county at the time, my mother immediately set about finding us a new place to live. I knew it was coming. I wouldn’t say that I felt excited, but I did feel relieved. Our apartment complex had a whole host of issues, from remodeling woes to poor management, that had led to a general feeling that the only reasonable course was to get out of there as fast as possible. We took our time house-hunting though, wanting to find the perfect place. And we found it, or thought we did. 

     Our first contractor scammed us out of a bunch of money. Our second contractor did his best, but there were so many problems that I have doubts as to his skill, but it was my mother’s first time renovating a house and she didn’t want to find anyone else. We hoped to stay in our apartment until our house was renovated, but it took so long that we had to move in anyways. When the remodeling was complete, we kept finding issues. Finishing on the cabinets breaking, minor plumbing issues, stuff that might not have been related to the remodel but didn’t raise the house in our eyes. It’s gotten to the point that my mother says that when she retires, we’re moving somewhere else. 

     I’m a writer, so naturally this house has become something of a symbol for me. It’s a representation of what I like to think of as failed optimism. 2014 was a time of hope for me. I was in college studying for a major I thought I’d like. I was doing well in school, I wouldn’t have to see my grandfather anymore, and we’d soon be out of the crummy apartment we were living in. As the years went by, I flunked a lot of courses (in part because I didn’t know how to study), I figured out I couldn’t make it in the major I started with, and we were stuck in the apartment for years. I eventually flunked so badly I had to quit college, and the house turned out to be a major disappointment. A lot of work, and while it was in a nice part of town it didn’t fix our growing list of complaints about the town itself. This house, therefore, is a representation of the hopes I had in my early college years, hopes that wouldn’t pan out. 

     Unlike my mother, I don’t want to leave. I thought that when my grandfather died, all of our problems would be fixed. We’d have a nice house, money to pay for college (I was taking out student loans at the time), and be able to do things other than visit relatives twice a year. Ten years on, I know that while it fixed some issues, it created a lot of new ones. I don’t want this house to just represent all the ways my mother and I failed to achieve our dreams I want it to represent the ways in which we made it work out in the end. I don’t want to run away from our problems this time. I don’t know if this is where we’re meant to be, but I know we won’t find where we’re meant to go by running from place to place. I want to leave after I find myself and know where I belong. More importantly, I want to leave this house as a person who doesn’t try to solve her problems by wishing them out of existence. My grandfather shouldn’t have had to die for me and my mother to be happy. Even if it had fixed our problems, it’s not something that should have had to happen. 

A Magic Eye Poster

 There’s this great moment in BoJack Horseman where Diane tells her husband, Mr. Peanutbutter that, “Sometimes I feel like our marriage is like a Magic Eye poster. It’s messy, and at first glance it doesn’t make any sense and it’s hard to figure out. But, sometimes, if you squint at it just right, everything lines up and it’s the most beautiful, wonderful, amazing thing.” I remember that quote, because I feel like I spend most of my life looking at things that just seem to be random, messy, and nonsensical, and it’s deeply rewarding when you finally figure it out. Or, as Diane puts it, “Squint at it just right.” What really resonates with me, and with a lot of people, is when she follows it up with, “I’m so tired of squinting.” 

     Most of us are tired of squinting. All we do these days is try and make sense of senseless circumstances. Take Israels genocide of Gazan citizens. Nobody wants it, but our politicians won’t stop funding it. What sense does that make? Are they assuming our hatred of Trump and the republican party will be enough to take them to victory? Are they forgetting that not-voting is an option? That may be the worst example, but it’s far from the only one. We’re still being pushed to give up our dreams of working remotely, with excuses that no one in their right minds believes in. We’re being told that not only is Covid over, which it isn’t, but that we should forget that it ever happened. A few candlelight vigils and some memorials are all we get. Our world died, and we’re being denied an opportunity to mourn. 

     It’s not just our politicians and bosses who are forcing us to squint. It’s the idiots online who insist we overlook our president performing a literal genocide so that the worse candidate won’t have a chance to win. Never mind the fact that Trump shouldn’t even be allowed to run in the first place. But rather than question why the hell a president no one wanted who everyone knows broke multiple laws is allowed anywhere near a ballot, we’re supposed to square up and valiantly… kiss Biden’s ass to keep him in power. Any outsider looking at us right now would wonder what the hell we were thinking. We shouldn’t be voting for anyone. We should be in the streets demanding candidates who don’t suck ass. 

     Like most people, I remember the 2010s as a time of optimism. It occurred to me recently that when people talk about getting back to normal, they talk about going back to the 2010s. A time when the internet was mature enough to have good stuff on it, but still had enough diversity for you to be able to find your people if you looked long enough. The App store was garbage, but not every game was trying its hardest to be Candy Crush. Tech had hit the plateau, but it wasn’t obvious that the industry was run by idiots. You could still by into the idea that without innovation our world would have something of a future. Best of all, Trump wasn’t president, and we knew he never would be. Sure, the Republicans were pulling a lot of dangerous stunts, but no one thought that we would elect a president who could ruin America forever. 

        The problem is that in 2024, the 2010s aren’t what they really were. Like a Magic Eye poster, they were messy and didn’t make a lot of sense, because people in general don’t make any sense. So instead of remembering what happened, we remember what we thought happened, or what we wanted to have happened. For example, I remember having a Surface pro in 2013, despite not getting one until my mother gave me her old one in 2016. I only know it was in 2016 because when I got it, windows 10 had been out for at least a year, and I didn’t have a Surface with Windows 8 on it. I think that my brain combined the good parts of college with the computer that I liked (as opposed to the cheapest laptop they had at Costco) because that lined up with my internal narrative that college was perfect and wonderful until 2016. But it wasn’t. I started college with a bad laptop that I bought solely because it had a touchscreen and, for some reason, I wanted to upgrade. I hated that laptop so much I blocked it out. What else could I have blocked out? 

     Most of us look back on the past with blinders, or to borrow a comparison from BoJack Horseman, squint until our past makes sense to us. But that doesn’t fix the past. Or the present. It doesn’t erase the problems that make our world confusing and messy. It doesn’t stop the deaths of millions, or the screaming of those who just want to pretend everything is alright. At some point, squinting isn’t enough to erase all of the bad parts. That’s what life is like these days. You can’t squint anymore. You can only close your eyes and try to block out the noise. 

Thoughts on 2024 so far

     The problem with writing all of my posts on Monday is you can tell when I start the week in a bad mood. Let's just say that 2024 has not started off promisingly, and I'm not accepting "Not as bad as 2023" as an improvement. I know we've had worse, but I'm not quitting until we've managed to have a year that, for once, doesn't leave the entirety of the United States longing for the sweet release of death. Or the rapture. I'm fairly certain I'm not the only person who feels that hell would be preferable to being alive. 

      It's not just that we've screwed up. People screw up all the time. It's that no one has the power on the inclination to fix anything. I can understand it being hard to believe in God, especially the Christian incarnation. I can understand not wanting to believe in your fellow humans, lord knows I don't. I don't understand being completely incapable of believing in Reality. We see it every day and are surrounded by people who see it everyday, and all of us know that our actions have consequences. Furthermore, we live in a democracy, and even autocracy runs on the idea that your army decides to shoot your enemies and not you. Our government can't survive if we decide that a world where either path leads to the death of innocents is completely unacceptable, and we act on that by booting the bastards out of office and picking a method of making sure they can't make it back in. Let's prove the libertarians wrong, and create a world where there is a choice between parties and you can make the right choice. If the people in charge won't do it, I guess that we'll just have to do it for them. And don't act like this is impossible. If the Fascists can act without leadership, there's no reason the far smarter left can't do the same thing, given the right incentives. 

My Extremely disorganized thoughts on Wish

      I'm one of the approximately ten people who saw a trailer for the latest Disney movie Wish. Of those ten people, I'm the single person who saw it and had an immediate and visceral "I have to see this movie when it comes out" reaction. When I went to see it today (well, yesterday as of the publication time), I was the only person who bought a ticket. I'd heard the rumors, I knew what I was in for, but I left the movie with the biggest grin on my face. I'm genuinely convinced that we'll have time travel in the future, because the only reason this film could have been made is if I financed it and wrote the script myself. It doesn't feel like a movie made for mass consumption, it feels like a movie made by me, for me, and I almost want to apologize for anyone else who went to see it because it's a little alarming to learn that I'm going to fall that far in the future. 

      I'm tempted to defend this movie, but as someone who watched some reviews of the movie after I left the theater that pointed out how bad it really is, with a bunch of points that I can't really argue against, that feels like the wrong call. Because yes, even I think that the goat is stupid and the supporting cast doesn't get enough characterization. Truth be told, this is a case where I love the premise for this film so much that it allows me to overlook any flaws in the execution. A young woman who finds out that her perfect world is actually deeply corrupt, seeks the power that will help, is branded a traitor, is almost destroyed by a bad guy much stronger than she is only to defeat him by harnessing her inner strength? Right up my alley. The one thing I would have changed would be to make the final fight between Asha and Magnifico be a bit more even, with a line or two from Asha telling Magnifico to eat dirt. Also, I feel like having Asha become the new wish granter of Rosas misses the point I feel this story should have, the point that a system can change and that power shouldn't be condensed into the hands of an individual. But I suppose it's asking too much of a greedy conglomerate to suggest that power ought to be shared with the masses. 

      To me, the thing that made this movie so powerful was its finale, where Magnifico has everyone pinned down and has captured Star. The moment when Asha remembers the song "I'm A Star" and has everyone start singing together and making wishes to take power back from Magnifico? That was incredible to me. I realize that particular beat has been done a hundred times in a hundred places, probably a lot better than this one, but in a world run by two-dimensional cartoon villains with no coherent motivations, it's nice to fantasize about a world where people aren't afraid to take power for themselves. I could be alone in thinking this, but I feel like the movie's overall theme is about power, about what it means to have power and about learning not to be afraid to take it for yourself. You'll notice that Asha goes from being a full supporter of the status quo, to someone who just wants more power for herself and those she trusts, to someone who fights on behalf of everyone in Rosas. I also really like how the Queen was able to see what an asshole her husband was and decide for herself that what he wanted wasn't okay, and decided to stand up on behalf of her own people. Mostly because, even now, I want to believe that our leaders are capable of seeing when they've made mistakes and growing as people. 

      My impression of this film when I first saw the trailer was that it was an incredible story trapped in a film made by Disney executives, and that's exactly what I got. Enough people have talked shit about this film that I do wonder if I'm crazy, but I'll stand by my belief that if you're able to look past this films problems (and to be fair, there are a lot of them), you'll find something special. Some people have called this film a children's film, implying that it's just a film for little kids, but I don't feel like that's an accurate descriptor of this film. It feels more like a film made by a kid. It feels like a story written by a novice writer with a strong vision of a story without the skills to quite flesh it out, someone who doesn't have enough skills to write within a template, and enough knowledge to know when to go outside it. I don't regret going to see it in the theater, but I wish that Disney had just cut it's losses and put it on streaming, because this isn't a film for film buffs. This is a film for those who like stupid stories told poorly with just enough heart that you love them regardless. 

The Loss of Our World

      The loss of reality doesn't happen overnight. It's slow, subtle, almost unnoticeable until it's too late. A favorite website goes down. No biggie, things change and nothing's meant to last forever. Your favorite celebrity dies. Well, it was just their time to go. A corporation you grew up with goes out of business. Shocking but, it happens. A sector disappears. Well, things change. One by one you lose the world you knew, until the moment you wind up in a place you went to all the time and have a disquieting realization; "There's nothing here for me anymore." 

      I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I used to live online. I'd return to reality to eat and to sleep, but almost all of my waking hours were spent on the internet, even when they should have been devoted to something else. A few days ago, I opened up Chrome, as is my habit, and suddenly my brain asked, "Why? There's nothing here for you anymore." It's right. Flash is dead, but even before it was killed off, the world it created had long been dying as free gaming transitioned to mobile. Twitter (or "X") is a raging dumpster fire, and I'd argue that Facebook and Instagram aren't doing much better. YouTube feels weirdly empty, as the people I once went to for inspiration and hope have been consumed by the void. Most of my favorite websites either went defunct or got bought out by someone, Nintendo is making it hard to find games to emulate (mind you, I don't do it that often), the world's publishers have gutted the Internet Archive, and what still feels worth visiting feels like a relic of 2010. I feel like the web as a whole has lost it's identity, and the people who run it only care about gutting the remains before they rot too much to be worth consuming. 

      It's not just an internet problem. The rising prices, the changing climate, the increase in fascist sentiment, all of these are big issues, but to me the biggest issue stems from a confluence of these issues and, in my opinion, is a direct cause of these issues; our collective Dreamworld is dead. It's been dead for a while now, and being a human, I assume that our leaders, being better at leading than I am, would notice this and be actively working to fix it. They aren't. They're still living in a Dreamworld that existed in 1990, a Dreamworld so old and frayed that it was inadequate even in 2019, before a pandemic arrived and shattered people's faith in reality. I'm no politician, but I know that if a random civilian can tell people need something new to believe in or else they'll lose all faith in their country, I know the politicians can to. We elected them for their ability to fool us, after all. As time goes on, they don't even seem interested in doing that. Only a select few of us have the right to be fooled by our leaders, and if we aren't fooled we're told we shouldn't have done the one thing everyone is taught to do from birth; participate in the world we were born in. 

      Now, it's not solely our politicians jobs to take care of us. All of us have a responsibility to shape the world and let it shape us in turn. But in order to do that, it has to be a world we can live in, and I've heard enough to know that it isn't one we can live in at all. Not when every corporate leader is squeezing their workers dry and even a blatant genocide is met with calls for cooperation rather than pressure on the assailants to stop. This doesn't feel like a world where we take care of ourselves. This feels like a world where we're kept in a perpetual childhood, the kind where your parents only love you if you obey them without question, and even then they'll sometimes mistreat you for no reason whatsoever. We're still dependent on our leaders for money, they just put so many steps between us and getting it that most of us don't get it at all. If it's not our politicians jobs to take care of us, why won't they give us a world where we can take care of ourselves. 

    You don't have to believe in subjective reality to know somethings wrong, and everywhere I look I see people talking about how this is horribly, dangerously wrong. Our leaders behavior goes beyond a refusal to se the Infinite, it's a refusal to see the truth, which is that the politics they stand for stopped being our politics decades ago. When we vote, we're being asked to choose between Fascism and the Status quo, and we've voted for the status quo because anything would be better than Fascism. But what happens when fascism becomes the only option we have left. 

     The loss of reality doesn't happen overnight, but it's creation can happen in an instant. All you need to do is help people see that they have no protection from the Infinite. I look out at the world, at a place you can only live in if you're very rich, and I wonder what it will take for our politicians to see that if they let things continue on, soon they'll be just as exposed to the Infinite as the populace they serve. Tell me, President Biden, do you want to live in a world that's only run by Dreamers? 

The Downfall of Twitter

    I'm writing this post on Monday, the day after Elon Musk decided to rebrand Twitter to being just X, like the button at the top right of your browser. Presumably it was a nice subtle way of warning all of those still on the platform to turn off the app for good, but so much of his life seems steeped in stupidity that I don't think he thinks at all. There's not much I can say on this, and his idiocy has infused Twitter to the point that stuff like this doesn't even shock me anymore. 

    I will say this, though, not because it hasn't been said but because it can't possibly be said enough at this point. Why, exactly, do we live in a world where everyone in power looks and acts almost exactly like Elon Musk? It's easy to point the finger at Capitalism, but a lot of our democratically elected officials also act like entitled idiots. Are we intentionally choosing the stupidest people to run the country, or are we just trapped in a world where it's better not to think too closely about the flaws? Remember, society is a Dreamworld at heart, and like all Dreamworlds it's only real as long as people believe that it exists. Isn't it possible that many people live in a world where the flaws have gotten so obvious that you can't ignore them anymore unless you're stupid, so they've chosen to hide behind the stupidity of a man believed to be God himself? 

     I won't pretend that the gullible, the narcissistic, or the just plain evil don't exist, but looking at the world as someone who doesn't believe in an external, objective reality, but just a world where people have to work together to build a Dreamworld strong enough to protect them from the Infinite, I see a place where people are trapped. They don't have the tools to build a Dreamworld of their own, all they have is the world they were born and brought up in, a world that's rapidly falling into irrelevancy. I don't think this is a religious issue, because plenty of educated people who were brought up in cities are struggling with the same problem. 

    The fall of Twitter isn't just about one mans ego, it's about a world in which people want more but have, so far, not been allowed to have more. They've been told to just blame the other, or their false friends, or family who doesn't support them. Many know that the blame rightfully rests with our leaders, but I often think about the people who elected them, those who saw someone actively stripping them of their rights, and decided that was an appropriate sacrifice to keep their Dreamworld alive. I think about leftists insisting the answer lies in politics, or those on the right saying the answer lies in god alone. To me, the answer lies in both. We need politics and leaders who understand that they form the backbone of society, but we need a culture that understands the power and value of belief. Belief may not be magic, but it forms the lifeblood of every Dreamworld that people live in, and without it we're doomed to suffer as our Dreamworlds die. 

      The bottom line is that it's true that Twitter died because of Elon Musk's neglect and malice, but until we accept our world for what it is we won't be able to stop it from happening again. 

I Believe in the Universe

    I have no idea how yesterday's post read, but I'm not sure I care. I just really, really needed to feel like someone could hear me even if that someone was just a server at google storing yet another blogpost no one will read. I'd call what I'm feeling depression, but it doesn't feel like every other time I've been depressed. Normally depression comes when I'm not doing something that I really don't want to do, but now I want to do something that would, if not fix the world, at least give the new one a head start, but I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere. If anything I feel like the world is actively stopping me. I've mentioned before that I don't think any of us want to know that what we see isn't real, and I suspect that's because the Universe only exists because everything within it, atoms and planets included, believes in it and the laws of physics.

    I believe in the Universe, of course, but I also believe that there will come a time when we know enough about it for belief to falter, and when it does then we'll need a backup plan. Even if humanity goes extinct, there will be other intelligent species in the Universe and it's entirely possible one of them will be born on earth. One way or another, someone is going to break the boundary between us and physics, and when they do we owe it to our descendants to grant them some way to fix their mistake. And if it turns out that I'm wrong, we'll still have a useful tool for building society, one that reminds us that no matter how much science we discover belief will never go away and we can never quite be sure that what we're seeing is real. 

     What I need is something to believe in, and I believe in a world where people will always have something we call magic within them, and there will always be a spiritual world that everyone know about that science will always disprove. I believe that we will never stop believing in the silly, the impossible, perhaps even the outright dangerous, not because we're evil or stupid but because it's what we were meant to do. I believe in a species of apes who believes in everything they see and quite a lot of what they can't see but can only speculate on. We are a species of Dreamers, and so long as we live in a world that's desperate for meaning, that will never change.