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From the Trenches of #2022 : Your War Blogger

Good morning, and how are all my cosmic blueberries? Here, if you need a mood fix, there’s a gallery of hippie New Age good vibes I threw together on an old IMGUR post.

Sorry for not catching up more, but things have been busy. Blah blah blah, Pete doesn’t blog enough, blah blah, I don’t have time to boost my own site because I’m too busy boosting my clients’ sites.

I’ve also been hypnotized by the endless Doomscrolling feed of world news like the rest of you. Ukraine Putin Russia COVID climate change. Bad news all around. I’ve been telling you all it would get this bad years ago.

I Predicted Everything!

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how much of the year 2022 I prophesied, years and years ago. I’ve been tracing this line between Trump and Putin since Sally Yates got fired – yes, remember her, New Years’ Eve, 2017?

Oh, I am sure that we are all shocked at Vladimir’s Putin’s INSANE and senseless massacre of Ukraine, as well as his own soldiers, citizens, economy, etc. But, boys and girls, I have been following this yellow brick road a long ol’ time. Won’t you join me on my adventures?

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Why I Am Not Watching Squid Game

It’s impossible to avoid now, but for future generations: Squid Game was a TV series on Netflix. It got a viral marketing boost and now all of social media is teeming with foaming-mouthed fanatics insisting that everybody MUST WATCH this show immediately or there will be consequences.

Now I will tell you why, not only am I not watching Squid Game, but you should not watch Squid Game either.

We’ve seen enough class-struggle dystopian sci-fi

The first 10 times I saw a class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movie, I thought, “Yeah, great socio-political commentary!” The next 50 class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movies I saw, I thought, huh, neat take, but it’s been done. After that, every class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movie gives me the kind of heartburn you get from too much grease and not enough substance.

I’ve seen Snowpiercer, The Platform, and High-Rise. Somebody else already pointed out that they are exactly the same movie. I’ve also seen The Hunger Games, and Squid Game is literally the exact same premise. I’ve seen The Purge, Elysium, They Live, The Running Man, Freejack, Soylent Green, and V for Vendetta. Not to mention, as the above image forecasts, that Metropolis fits in this category too; the very first sci-fi movie ever made.

Let me save you some time and tell you all about every single one of the above movies. This is the entire point:

“Proletariat vs Bourgeoisie”

There are RICH PEOPLE, and they are EVIL for the sake of being EVIL!
There are POOR PEOPLE who suffer because they are POOR!
The RICH stay RICH by exploiting the POOR people and keeping them POOR!
Nobody can seem to do anything effective about it.
You should be MAD about this! MAD MAD MAD!

That’s all this is. A class-struggle sci-fi movie is not inspirational or instructive or educational or witty or original. It is not deep or profound. It’s not even a story. The entire point is to invoke the Krodha rasa and turn the viewer into the Incredible Hulk. Hulk hate rich people now!

Not only that, but we have a whole wing of literature devoted to the exact same effect, called dystopian literature. They include The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Brave New World, all of which are at the top of the list of most recommended books for required reading in school. I’ve written this same blog post about why force-feeding students these novels is a crime against intellect.

But we’ll go over it again, this time with movies and TV, because what I am saying really IS an original thought which is currently absent from all of world culture.

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Unprecedented Times: Don’t Underestimate the Impact of the Pandemic

UPDATE 12/22/2021: Unbeknownst to me at the time I first wrote this,
Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, stated that the impact of COVID-19 would be so great that the world requires “a Great Reset.” He makes many arguments similar to mine here. I didn’t know this existed when I wrote this post in July 2021.

In my freelance blogging business, I deal with mostly online entrepreneurs who have a website-driven business model. Ever since the pandemic hit, all my clients have been taken off-guard by the fallout. It’s not just that all the numbers in online business go down; some numbers go up too. The one consistent pattern is that nobody can predict what’s going on, and everybody wants answers.

For those of you in eCommerce who are also wondering what’s going on, I can provide some clues. I can’t provide definitive answers, and part of the clues will point out why. My purpose here is to lay out the mind-boggling scope of the pandemic’s impact on business.

The bottom line is that the economy is largely a chaos system. Chaos systems are huge, complex systems where small changes can cause huge ripple effects. The mark of chaos systems is that it is very difficult to predict what effect a given stimulus would have. Meanwhile, a global pandemic is also a chaos system, as natural phenomena with worldwide reach are wont to be. The result: The economy interacting with the pandemic is the front between two chaos systems, not just one!

But in the first place, there are not only people missing from the work force, but people missing from the mall. They are not shopping, or what shopping they are doing is bare necessities, not discretionary spending. They are not traveling, they are not buying tickets to anything, they are not being busy. So they are not stimulating business.

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Epiphanies After the Apocalypse

I survived the cyberpunk end times, and never got to assemble my own Mad Max warrior tribe. I got my COVID shots and never got weird mutant superpowers. I ventured out of my survivalist seclusion and found out the world is going to keep going.

Recently we’ve all emerged from COVID quarantine, and my household bravely ventured out to public life again. My first time dining out at an actual restaurant took some adjustment.

My darling wife of 30 years, Mrs. Penguin, could not afford to lose her cool. She is a patient woman, and I speak here as a man who is an expert at being impossible to take out in public. She sat in Felix & Oscars enjoying her personal pizza and margarita, happily munching and slurping away. I was eating too, but nervously. My sweaty hands gripped the table. My eyes scanning madly from side to side around the room. I assured her that I too, was having fun.

But inside my dumpster of a neurotic brain, I was screaming: “AAAAAAAAAAHHHH! I’M SURROUNDED BY PEOPLE!!!!”

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Attention Internet Court : Guilt Requires Intent

If you’re reading Harry Potter because you like J.K. Rowling’s alleged transphobia, you’re doing so with intent and are a bigot.

If you’re reading or watching Harry Potter because you like fantasy stories about wizards and magic, you’re not a bigot. Indeed, even if you’re reading just to see what all the fuss is about, you’re not a bigot.

If you don’t even think Rowling is seriously transphobic because she seems more to be just plain naive about society and culture, congratulations! As God is my witness, before the Rowling row I personally did not know that trans-folk menstruated at all, I thought they just got a Depo-Provera shot or something to have done with it. Nevertheless, Rowling doesn’t realize that Twitter isn’t the place to have this kind of in-depth debate and stupidly digs her way in deeper every time she opens her yawp. I’m still not convinced she’s intentionally bigoted.

If you bought Load O’ Lakes butter because you like having submissive female native Americans kneeling at your breakfast table to feed your imperialist fantasy, you’re a bigot. And weird.

If you bought Load O’ Lakes butter because it’s just damn butter and never gave a thought to the packaging, you’re not a bigot.

Wanna see more? Right this way!

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Crazy Times Don’t Last, But Crazy People Do

Greetings and the usual introduction about how the current news cycle is as nutty as squirrel poop. However, there is light at the end of this tunnel. I see signs of meager improvement. The year 2021 is so far being nicer to us than 2020. Let’s get to brass tacks and bras tax:

Was The Matrix Just A Propaganda Film? – #Matrix #glitch #thematrix #neo #redpill https://t.co/TnB9xIhgzv

— Penguin Pete 🐧 (@Penguin_Pete) February 6, 2021

If you follow my Twitter feed, I also broadcast my latest work there occasionally. Lately at the geeky fandom beat, I got sick and tired of The Matrix getting a free pass with all the crazy conspiracy theories it’s spawned. If we’re going after the toxic media that poisons our minds, let us include the popular ones. We openly laugh at the spastic static of Marjorie Taylor Greene, but wrap the same bullshit in a leather trenchcoat with cool guns and we literally make a religion out of it.

And nothing appears to be as popular as The Matrix. Between Red Piller Incels and people murdering their parents because they thought they were living in a computer simulation, The Matrix is responsible for indoctrinating people to a level similar to The Turner Diaries. Yet social media does not allow you to criticize The Matrix! The Wachowski siblings are sacred, untouchable cows. You get stoned to death by angry mobs for daring to suggest that they don’t walk on water.

UPDATE: As usual, after I finish my thesis, I find a video with a reasoned scientific argument agreeing with me!

Using the same logic, we could say “there are more ants than people on Earth, therefore the odds are better that we are ants.”

I like that! Let’s insert a jump here before my front page gets overloaded.

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I Had a Very Animated January

Pay no attention to Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space in the banner. We’ll circle back to that eventually. By the way, there is no rule 34 of that show, and I demand to speak to the manager of the Internet.

Over at GeekyDomain, we focus a lot on games, movies, comics, and all that, but I proposed that we’d neglected anime and animation in general. We should make up for that with a whole month just devouring animation. There’s so much in that vein that modern audiences just don’t know exists, especially older stuff they might have caught as a kid and half-remembered now. It’s the cure for the winter blahs, I soapboxed, so everybody went along with that.

That got me on an animated kick. First I commemorated Liquid Television, MTV’s groundbreaking showcase, which was a cheery bazaar of shorts, experimental projects, pilots, and episodes of series that could barely be tracked down otherwise. It was the launch point for Aeon Flux, Psychograms, The Maxx, and later Cartoon Sushi and the eventual launch of Cartoon Network. And then I barely had room to discuss USA Network’s Night Flight, a show with very similar DNA.

There’s no shortage of Gen-X kids who wax nostalgic for Night Flight now, but a lot of viewers couldn’t be bothered to stay up at 3 AM watching every random bit of craziness which tracked onto the screen, so they missed bits like Arise!, the Church of the Subgenius “recruiting” film. Let us pause in reverent amazement: In the early 1990s, before Bob J.R. Dobbs became the Internet’s very first meme, when Robert Anton Wilson yet drew breath, there was a Church of the Subgenius special aired on public television. Where ordinary muggles could see it. How we survived that calamity is anybody’s guess.

And that was just the first step of my month-long adventure…

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Now My Other Gigs Are Infected With Occult Influence

You could say the same for every day of the cursed year of 2020, but my timeline seems to have been particularly dark since reviewing – and being bit by – Cultist Simulator. It was indeed a fit spooky choice for October, which dragged me through the month as I’ve tried to keep up my horror viewing in the middle of everything else.

Is Ignite Cannabis Co. trying to tell us something?

At my stoner DabConnection gig, we’ve become the freelance police of the cannabis industry busting fake brands of THC vape cartridges left and right. But this time I got interested in a real brand managed by an Instagram influencer Dan Bilzerian, though “real” and “managed” are both up for debate. The brand has raised millions in investor funding and squandered millions more with Bilzerian apparently going through the most hysterical public midlife-crisis ever. We’re talking $50 million in 2019 alone!

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Might as Well Start October With a Zombie President

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.

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The Invisible Nation

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 8^th, 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!

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