In H.P. Lovecraft’s America, Halloween seems almost redundant, but we can all try our best to get in the festive spirit anyway. Between the cults and the plague, any horror movie you watch this time of year seems downright sunny by comparison. And now most of our leadership exists in a Red-Wedding-cliffhanger twilight of infection. I told you guys, zombie apocalypse.
I’ve been sucked into the cult of Cultist Simulator!
I got the game off Steam for an early birthday present for myself, in keeping with the spirit of an Autumn person. I haven’t been able to put it down since! This led to my writing up a review / guide / journey through Cultist Simulator at my GeekyDomain gig – not once, not twice, but in three parts.
As a freelance blogger, what I really do for a living is just explore. That’s it; I visit some exotic far-off realm of the anthropocene noosphere, and I report back on what I found. I always find something weird and squirmy, without even digging much.
My favorite thing to do in the world is to open the door on closet cultures most of you never knew existed, and drag them out in the daylight. Even though I snark a lot, I love these pocket societies because they present an alternative view of the world. We all have our own perspective on “where it’s at.” Where is it at? That depends on whom you ask. Maybe the lost tribes are right. Maybe the underground subcultures are right. Maybe we should all ditch everything and go find enlightenment in some hidden digital playground because that’s all the meaning we have left to get out of life. Maybe we’re all deluding ourselves. Maybe we have no choice, and our only relevant decision is to pick the delusion that allows the most comfort.
One of my clients, 123ish.com, is an international platform which has been gracefully accepting some of my most maddened rants over the years. Sadly, they do not have a way to link to an author’s page using their set-up. So from here on out, I will maintain this specific blog post and link it from this site’s front page, serving as a pseudo-directory to my work over there.
Links to all my 123ish.com posts in chronological order (bottom = newest) after the jump:
As the United States witnessed firsthand in the 2016 election, technology is now as good as the prime mover in US politics. From the flap over Clinton’s emails to Trump’s impulsive Twitter rants in the wee hours of the night, and from the Facebook ecology of political posts in the months leading up to November 8th, 2016, to the self-organizing flash mobs of protesters and rioters that emerged after the fact, that election was shaped by electronic communication more than any election before it.
We’ve become more aware of that in the past four years, but it was creeping up on us then.
Which raises a very pertinent question: Just how much is high-tech media going to shape the world? Will we become a race of hyper-sentient empaths? Are we all merging into a hivemind?
When anybody in the world can transmit any amount of information to anybody else in the world in a split second, all barriers have been lifted. There’s really no practical difference between the average person now and an omniscient being, at least as far as an ancient Biblical author would have conceived it. Each of us carries in our pocket a device granting us powers that, one hundred years ago, would have been seen as nigh on godly.
But that’s the trouble with a planet full of omniscient gods: They become a royal pain to boss around. Yet we need to regulate this space now, right now!
Greetings, energy beings of planet Gaia! I have ingested large quantities of an exotic plant from the Far East which gave me new, mutant powers of bullshit detection and a renewed faith in our one true god Zardoz. It doesn’t matter how interesting your week has been, mine has been more interesting.
Discovery #1: Kratom is Bullshit!
At the behest of my client at DabConnection.com, I experimented with this Thai herbal drug making the rounds at convenience store kiosks. Read my bummer trip report on kratom here, where I risk bodily soundness and my sanity in trying to get any reaction out of this rip-off product, including gulping down mugs of kratom tea on an empty stomach at 5AM because that’s the thing you do on an average weekend morning! Alas, I got nothing but dead air for the trouble, which included gulping down so many of the half-gram pills that I rattle when I jump up and down.
I love my career.
I found out confirmed proof that alleged “kratom strains” all come from the same plant, too. My suspicion that the alleged “kratom plant” is actually catnip can neither be confirmed nor denied by my cat, who recognizes catnip but will not touch the stuff.
If I offer him catnip, he’ll sniff it once and give me a dirty eye, insulted that I would disrespect him with this offering, before pointedly batting it away. I have a Mormon cat.
In this Monday’s edition of my weekly exploration log, I got curious about marijuana propaganda and decided to dig into who is behind all the billboards popping up in weed-legal states. The answers, as you might expect, range from complete mysteries to right-wing muscle groups to hair-raising teen-torture scared-straight camps. JWZ, world’s biggest fan of They Live(1988), would have been proud of me. I felt just like this:
Anti-Drug billboards sponsored by Straight Incorporated founders
And seriously, I’m not kidding about teen-torture camps. Some of them are sponsored by “Drug Free America Foundation,” no surprise, but that foundation was founded by the same husband and wife team behind Straight Incorporated. Sample review:
“Straight, Incorporated was a very destructive, highly controversial and extremely abusive cult that shamelessly and dishonestly, masqueraded as a drug rehab for teenagers in several parts of the United States from 1976 to 1993.”
“These teenagers who were incarcerated in all of these savage Straight locations usually ranged in age from 13 to 20 years of age. The Straight cult had these Warehouse type facilities which operated in states such as California, Virginia, Texas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Georgia, Maryland, Ohio and Florida. Contrary to the mythology and propaganda endlessly perpetuated by Straight, these kids were not clients! These teenagers were hostages. While on First Phase they were imprisoned and held against their will physically,emotionally and psychologically (and sadly in so many cases, all three,) at the Straight Facility during the day and at night they were shuttled and transported (against their will) to various foster homes where they were held against their will there as well.”
The hair-raising tales of torture, rape, brainwashing, and even deaths in these American teen-torture camps rival many a horror story from the Holocaust, and it’s going on right under our noses right now, nobody knows. Start digging here, and here, and here. Bring your barf bag. This industry has gone on with no oversight, no regulation, for decades now, without once breaking the news. Remember when Mitt Romney was running against Obama? He was financed by WWASP. The teen torture industry has some deep ties to US religions that have an unusual interest in UFOs, which might explain why the closer to Utah you go, the creepier the anti-marijuana billboards get.
Parents should take education into their own hands, even before COVID-19
Even though we sent our kids through public school, we homeschooled them as if they weren’t attending. That’s because the public school system in the US is so gutted, so hostile to intelligence, such a Babylon of pseudo-learning idolatry, that I have to wonder if it does more harm than good.
I dunno, it’s like US schools had some other focus besides learning. I can’t quite put my finger on it though. It’s on the tip of my tongue.
Maybe I’ll recall what it is…
In case you missed it (because who even checks by this dead blog to begin with?), I also covered freelance writing in a post-COVID-19 world. So there, you have your school covered and your work covered, all off-grid. Call us when we get a government that’s interested in doing anything for people again.
The good news is that your humble freelance hack blogger has the household power and Internet restored. That was nuts! The derecho storm marched right through the middle of Iowa, and I have to say in retrospect I’d rather have ten tornadoes than another derecho.
So I’m obligated to blog the experience both for a first-person historical account and to explain to my freelance clients why I vanished for two days. Pictures here are from the news, not mine.
What it’s like after a derecho and city-wide blackout
In the first place, most of the destruction occurred in the late morning hours of Monday, August 10th 2020. It just hit with a force like a shock wave. Trees flying immediately.
The power blinked off within minutes, and we could guess why. What we didn’t know is that this time, the storm’s effects were widespread. Our Internet router was of course knocked out too, but our land line phone remained functional. We hopped onto mobile, but discovered that our local mobile coverage was also spotty.
I may get around to talking about the rest of gaming news, but it’s going to be hard to get past this first. In my GeekyDomain gig I’m obligated to talk about game trends. Recently when I browse Steam, one game kept shoving itself into my face over and over. Judging from its top-rated position, it seems to be the hottest (oh God stop the puns already!) free casual game lately.
I’ve been tricked into playing a game about seducing demons
So I tried it, beat it even (it takes minutes), and found out what the big deal was. Helltaker is an indie dating sim about assembling a harem of demon girls, after some obligatory puzzle and bullet hell elements. And you, all you depraved people, you wretched goblins made me play that just to see what all the fuss was about.
So now we know why half the fanart base has been taken over by devil girls eating pancakes lately. And honestly, even if I’m not down with this particular scene, I get it, I really do. I even analyze why in that post.
But that doesn’t mean that I quit finding all things concerned with Satanism and Hell to be side-splittingly hilarious. I love how Zdrada has a cross necklace. It’s amazing how well one indie Polish developer managed to capture Western humor so adeptly. That’s vanripper if you want to follow him to see what devilment he gets up to next.
UPDATE: Dr. Fauci just said everything you’re about to read here in a vastly different number of words and more diplomatically, FSM bless his soul. He did that on CNN in an interview, 8/5/2020, but it’s a reiteration of what he says in this article. He remarks that anti-science sentiments are just “for reasons that sometimes are inconceivable and not understandable.”
Likewise, his family continues to get death threats merely to pressure this brave man into shutting up. That’s a point where I can express some solidarity with his situation, having confronted the exact same phenomenon for the exact same reasons when I started blogging.
Now on with the original post…
None of you reading today will have much reason to believe this. Indeed, most of the evidence is washed away from the Internet now. But I was once one of the most hated figures on the web. That was because, in the early 2000s, I was one of the few people advocating for science literacy via computing literacy.
Nobody wanted to listen then. Don’t Make Me Think was a bestseller. Command lines and hacker tools were held up as something holding people back, something to be avoided, in books like The Design of Everyday Things. Nick Bostrum proposed that we might be living in a computer simulation, and the entire Internet instantly agreed that this was ironclad fact, brooking no argument. Ray Kurzweil wrote book after book about how Artificial Intelligence would make computers “wake up” any day now, and the Singularity would be nigh. Matrixism was treated like a real religion by people who could not tell Wachowski brothers’ movies from reality.
