A Link to the Copypast

Below follows a blog entry I wrote on Gaia Online in 2007. I recently found it again and I thought it was sort of cute - it might perhaps say something about how I've changed over the past four years.

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This is a blog.
You heard me. A blog is a blog is a blog is a blog is a blog, as Gertrude Stein said it, and she probably meant something by it, too. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas might be one of the more interesting pairs in the history of authors, though I doubt it, since it seems authors are so often good friends. I mean, many awesome authors knew each other - F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Kurt Gödel and Albert Einstein, and so on. They did write books on science, so they are authors. And were friends. Before they died - maybe afterwards too, I do not know.

Friendship is defined by Wikipedia as co-operative and supportive behaviour between two or more humans. Humans differ from dwarves and elves in that they have no racial modifiers to ability scores, and gain one bonus feat and one extra skill point per level. One extra skill point per level is very useful, and many people actually favourise playing humans over other races simply for game-mechanical reasons; they're so much more versatile, whereas optimising other races requires specialisation - with the possible exception of dwarves. Yes, I would have to say, game-mechanically humans and dwarves are definitely preferrable.

Terry Pratchett never used the plural form "dwarves", only "dwarfs". I don't know why He did that, maybe there was a point to it. Note that I just now accidentally depressed shift and capitalized "He". If this isn't some sort of keyboard Freudian slip, it's probably just a typo. Nonetheless, this typo makes it seem as though Terry Pratchett is some sort of deity or god. He's not. When submissivies in a Dominance/submission-relationship refer to their dominator, they also use capitalisation, as in He. Terry Pratchett does not dominate me, though he owns, in the modern descriptive-of-skills meaning of the term.

Dominance/submission is a fetish, much less physical and more psychological than other branches of BDSM. For this reason, it requires much more acting skills and also much more trust between the involved parts, since anyone can spank a woman but only a select few can expose her to psychological "torture" without any real imminent danger. Torture was invented by the Japanese as a means to cook fish, but it wasn't entirely successful; the Japanese nobility, known as Vicomtes, took to the dish with heart - but since this was in 1532, Jonas Salk and his army of sparks invaded Prussia, stealing with them the secret to immortal life and twelve oven mitts that belonged to Federico de Soya. This caused tortured fish to be largely forgotten as food.

Food is necessary for human survival, and for that of most other animals. Wikipedia defines it as "any substance, usually composed primarily of carbohydrates, fats, water and/or proteins, that can be eaten or drunk by an animal or human being for nutrition or pleasure." Given this definition, it is a little vague whether or not chewing gum is food, since it's not technically eaten but certainly is for pleasure, unless it gets stuck in someone's hair.

That happened to a friend of mine at a festival a few weeks back, it was quite nasty. Fortunately she only needed to cut off very few strands of hair, otherwise she would've looked silly, and looking silly isn't fun, unless you're a clown. A famous Swedish comedian, speaking of clowns, is Gösta Ekman, who once starred in the absurdist comedy "Picassos Äventyr", also called "Adventures of Picasso."

I have seen this movie; all the actors were good, but aside from Ekman I especially liked Wilfrid Brambell, who played Alice B. Toklas. Alice B. Toklas was a long-standing and good friend of Gertrude Stein, who wrote that "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose", and she probably meant something by it, too. Gertruide Stein and Alice B. Toklas might be one of the more interesting pairs in the history of authors, though I doubt it, since it seems authors are so often good friends. I mean, many awesome authors knew each other - F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Kurt Gödel and Albert Einstein, and so on. They did write books on science, so they are authors. And were friends. Before they died - maybe afterwards too, I do not know.

I hope they were friends afterwards. It would give me some hope that friendship is more than just the Wikipedia definition.

A Quote

"There is some powerful mystery between all these perfect, solid things... and that is my God. My God is what I don't know."

--The One Electronic, from Rice Boy by Evan Dahm.

Why Selfishness?

This is... perhaps a weird thing to be thinking, but it's something that has been bothering me for a while:

What reason is there to be selfish? Why have we accepted the axiom that "I should try to benefit myself"? Why do we somehow believe that there's any reason to do so?

I mean, put it like this: There are maybe 7 billion people on the planet. Why do I care that a particular person out of these 7 billion is better off? What reason do I have for that? Is it just that I'm more acutely aware of that person - that I can hear that person's thoughts, that I can perceive that person's hunger and thirst?

That doesn't really make any sense, does it? That's like saying "There are plenty of paintings in the world, but I can see this one most clearly because it's standing right there, so therefore it must be the most important painting in the world and I should care about it more than I care about any other painting."

Wickedness

So in Iceye's post "Who do you think you are?" the question of evil was discussed in the comments. I just read the latest comment, stated by ShadoWolf that "No one considers themselves to be evil when they do something most would call evil."

I disagree. I can't speak for other people, but I see a lot of wickedness in myself.

Now, I cannot claim to believe in a "universal evil", of course, because that implies some sort of omniscent judge, and while I have what I consider solid evidence of the existence of the Blind Idiot God, I don't believe it judges.

I do, however, believe in a subjective sort of evil - as a sort of "necessary fantasy" in order to properly function. Why have I never killed anyone? The long and short of it is "Because I have been convinced that murder is evil". If I didn't regard murder as an evil thing, I would have no real reason not to do it (disregarding the "I might be caught" angle, but honestly, how likely are you to be caught if you murder a random stranger for the lulz? Not very.)

Evil may be a fantasy, something that does not objectively exist - "as real as Santa" - but unlike Santa, it is a necessary fantasy. It's a made-up belief that we, at least on a personal level, need in order to function as a modern society. It's like how the medieval church needed God to function; the church was objectively useful, it created order and provided employment for countless people - but its authority was (probably, at least) entirely fictive, there was no "real" reason to listen to the Pope. Yet, if nobody had listened to the Pope, we wouldn't have literacy in the Western world.

It's the same with "evil". If we didn't believe in it, society would collapse, because people would undertake any selfish act that they thought they could get away with.

Occasionally, people do selfish things - but often, they regret them afterwards, because they think that the act is wrong; they consider themselves, in some small fashion, "evil" for having done it.

That's how I understand the word, at least.

Hallucinogenic

Sometimes I think that, maybe, I was born with a natural presence of LSD in my body. I have strange hallucinations, chiefly when I'm halfway between sleeping and wakeful, but sometimes I see things even when I'm fully awake, strange things at the edge of my consciousness that I somehow - for just a split second, but sometimes for much longer - actually believe in.

After I had this thought, that maybe my body chemistry maybe naturally includes a little bit of hallucinogenics, I came to think of something: Our body chemistry is calibrated to see the world in a certain way. We would all see it in more or less the same way because we all have more or less the same body chemistry.

But what if there are facets of reality that we can only see while we're on drugs? What I mean to say is, what if some alternate chemical balance - one induced by, say, LSD - allows us to see things that are really there, but that our normal body chemistry can't translate into the proper neural impulses? What if shamans going on vision-quests aren't just hallucinating, but actually re-calibrating their biological make-up to perceive another spectrum of reality?

There actually isn't anything scientifically impossible or even scientifically unlikely about that thought; perception is a very complicated feat of neurobiology, and evolution would seek to make it practical - but not necessarily correct or comprehensive. If there are things we don't need to see to survive, evolution would make it so that we did not see these things.

The body is a prison. Some days, I just really want to see what the world is like outside its walls.

Anti-Immigration

So the governor of Alabama has signed the harshest anti-immigration law of any American state. On June 9, a bill was signed that makes it a crime to be in Alabama without proof of legal presence. The new crime is called "willful failure to complete or carry an alien registration document".

All immigrants must at all time carry proof of legal presence. Sure, carrying identification is a necessity in modern society, but only if you want to do something. Ordinary people aren't taken into custody just for walking down the street without their ID card. But in Alabama, that may well be the case for anyone who looks foreign. That's a little creepy.

And then I read this: "If a person knew that they were transporting or harboring an undocumented immigrant, they would be committing a crime and subject to punishment of up to a year of jail time."

Am I paranoid if this looks like the beginning of a slippery slope to me?

(Source: Ethics Daily

Skilled Writing

So I already know that I have a powerful imagination, and can be quite sensitive to fiction and art overall. I very easily empathize with main characters in movies and books and feel a slight twinge if someone has, say, their arm cut off.

But when I found a copy of Chuck Palahniuk's "Haunted" at the library, and remembered that I'd read about the incident when Mr. Palahniuk had to stop reading it aloud because people in his audience were fainting, I thought, "Hey, can it really be that bad?"

Apparently it can.

I made it through the introduction without much problems. After about fifteen pages, I was delighted - "This is really taking me out of my comfort zone", I thought, "It's quite provocative."

After another five pages, I was skipping a few lines because I was uncomfortable reading them. At page twenty-three I think it was, I had to close the book because it was making me physically sick and I was afraid I might throw up on it. The fact that the book had big, suspicious yellow stains all over those pages also made me suspect I might not be the first to do so - which didn't help.

In case you're curious, the book more or less starts with one of the characters relating a bunch of anecdotes on people getting injured while masturbating. It starts with "You know autoerotic asphyxiation? Yeah, that's child's play in comparison to what these guys did..." and, well, then it goes on with "That's child's play in comparison to what happened to me."

This blog post is my recognition that, despite being desensitized by years on the Internet, and despite having seen pictures of some pretty gross stuff, Chuck Palahniuk can still cause me to almost vomit, using nothing but words. I tip my hat to that kind of writing skill.

(In the end, I decided to borrow another book.)