#327

Looking over some news, and came across some ideas I found too delicious to resist writing some ideas back at. Don't really know that it's a great thing for the blog to be used that way, as my personal comment thread, and I have tried to refrain from that, but it's been creeping back in lately. I mean, I could have written a lot more posts about China. Well, I did write them. I didn't publish them, though. That's something.

Anyway, the salient bits are this: more deepfaked and AI generated images than ever, human brain tasked with processing five percent more information per day every year and it drains people, information apocalypse, a construction worker can make a viral shitpost of the Pope in a puffer while tripping on shrooms and people will think it's real.

It's 2023, twenty years since I started lurking forums on the old web, and to this day I am amazed at how precise and applicable a predictive engine the language I absorbed back then proved to be. The Trump presidency was predicted. The takeover of meatspace by online dynamics and the escalation of the culture wars thereby was not only predicted but theorized, workshopped, designed, and launched, like a flock of autonomous drones darkening the skies. I watched it happen in horror and awe, astonished and fearful, like Ian Malcolm seeing the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park for the first time. The crazy sons of bitches did it, they said what they were going to do and they did it. Meatspace people still think Buzzfeed is like this normal thing that just happened organically instead of a psychic harpoon that punctured their blubber and extended poisonous barbs. Their methodology works on the micro to this day. Practically every niche tworter account swollen with ingroup influence, whose gyrations predict the shape of thousands of sycophant accounts, began as a "mere" shitpost/joke account, as Buzzfeed was once a "mere" shitpost/joke generator/aggregator. It's why my face twists over to one side when someone tells me to lighten up, it's "just" shitposting. It's like, son, I was there. Do you understand? I was reading the posts when these fuckers were telling each other how shitposting is never just shitposting, and this is how we prove it. I was there when they proved it, and now we are all here. 

It is my habit to trade in mental images, especially of internet; one of the reasons people were surprised for a long time that hadn't read Snow Crash. Well, now I have, and the image of ziggurat therein is a powerful one, dispensing the binary commands on which a society operates. How about this: a warehouse big enough to contain eight billion player pianos. 

Hm. I don't have much of a point, I guess, except that some of us have been girding our loins for this type of shit and the level at which it is starting to operate for decades. I have never imagined trusting words and images on internet; almost since I began daily usage I have understood that it is more like a dream than anything else, that words and pictures and even math can lie on internet and that to trust any part of it or think that it is real is to invite a kind of death into your mental processes. It is my overriding assumption, my phalanx, that statements of fact on the internet are designed to mislead your thinking, and that images have been manipulated. To adopt a more relaxed position is to invite calamity. That is all.

*

Another tidbit that I found delicious and amazing was that one Artificial Intelligence guy saying we will one hundred percent go extinct if we don't cut the AI shenanigans like immediately. 

It's like, I hope they stop too! But mostly because it's all been so stupid. It's been a stupid revolution, and it's a stupid way to die. Yet, it is a highly probable way to die. Hope killer AI gives me the chance to smoke that classic final cigarette, because stopping is not a thing we do, as species, as a global civilization. Even if by some miracle ninety percent of all labs and individuals everywhere did stop, the people who most should stop will continue, so as not to lose their precious edge over their competitors, who have not stopped because they know the first motherfucker won't stop, and so on around the world like a noose, plus the dumbfucks who don't stop because they think it's alarmist bullshit. 

At this point, I'm just glad for a surefire solution to climate change. That's probably a factor of my failure to reproduce, but I'm going to take comfort in it anyway. 

*

Against my better judgment, I grabbed Resident Evil VII.I.AGE, and it has been massively rewarding. Resident Evil 4 was never scary enough; this bastard plays like RE4, but it horrifies in a way playing as the world's twinkest superhero never could. No matter what fucked shit RE4 threw at me, I was ready to take it and fuck it up right back. There was tension--certainly, I didn't want to have my head chainsawed off, or plucked from my shoulders and devoured by a writhing parasite. But I was never terrified by the very concept. Playing RE7.1, I don't want any of this shit to happen to me, and on top of that, the things I'm seeing transcend tension and impact the very gut with basal, reptile fear. In RE4, I wanted to shoot the next thing, make progress, to prove my shit-hot skillset. I don't want anything in RE7.1 at all, I want nothing to happen, I want it all to stop, except for getting my daughter back, even though she's clearly some type of fungus, and so am I, apparently. Going by his example, all damage to the body--legs, shoulders, protracted blood loss, whatever--can be repaired by splashing one's left hand with plant extract and pure alcohol. 

It's like, I didn't play Resident Evil 7. Ezra's playing it now, though, and RE7.1 had a nice little recap. But he's definitely some kind of mutant, right? He's a bioweapon. This Mold shit has altered him fundamentally. But still, man. Some shit pierces the illusion. Not enough to block the incredible fear this game makes me feel, like a thick cold syrup invading my blood, but enough that I notice it every time.

Anyhow, I'm two bosses in--that shit in the basement of the house with the puppets was UNBELIEVABLY FUCKED--and I'm hoping this feeling lasts at least all the way through the first playthrough. I understand that subsequent playthroughs will be an exercise in dominance over the material, but for now, cold fear, please and thank you.

--JL

#188

Just want to say that to me, using the word "Libra" as a proper noun for your currency sounds too much like Final Fantasy, first and least of all. I think you fucked up, facebook*. It's not tough to get what their marketers were going for, you know, liberation, unchaining the world through the blockchain (irony**), it is the Spanish word for granting or gaining freedom, certain currencies, and also the pound in ounces, which is also a former British currency, the British being the arguable founders of modern currency and banking, but this is the new shit and the revolution because Libra, etc. 

But look. Look. Don't name your currency the same as an astrological sign, no matter how obvious the symbol is for what you are trying to do (the scales invoke justice and balance, like facebook is very concerned about what is fair and just). Someone should have stopped you a long time ago. I am glad that you are not trying to cure cancer, facebook people.

Guess a bunch of people are on board, though. They'll make money hand over fist for a second, before facebook fucks each and every last one of us right up the ass and for real something like Black Monday goes down, once again with our own personal lives collectively raining out the windows along with the cashrats who played so fast and loose with them.

*

So. The Internet. 

Referring to internet just so, as though I were pointing at a dog without a name, is a quirk I picked up from Jeffrey Rowland of Wigu fame, internet's poet cowboy godfather. Maybe this assessment of the man's imprint is specialized; one of those "you had to be there, in order to think and feel as I do" things (everything? "you had to be there" is one of the most boner-killing tautologies, and it's usually hiding a kind of lie). But as I discussed yesterday, breaking ground is deceptively humble, and everything that comes after must make it seem tame and quaint.

This is known as proof of concept.

*

It begins and ends with webcomics, of course. I liked the internet okay initially as an information-gathering and communication tool (as I will confess, I was not always such a lurker), but the .jpeg had to hit its stride before internet truly seized my faculties. I started using internet about 1998, but did not truly get into it till 2002, and wasn't deep till 2003. Webcomics were the portal, the food that drew me to the rabbit hole, and they were themselves a great object lesson in how internet culture was to refract, warp, bend, and ultimately give rise to establishment and merge with a corporate economy. Among other things.

*

When I say deep, I think of individuals that were among the first perusing snuff sites and buying sex slaves that come with a bonus bag of heroin crammed into their rectum, or were building their own open-source operating systems in order to make themselves into powerful virtual entities by various computing methods. When I say deep, I do not mean that I have posts out there on defunct forums that told all my "friends" how to crack the system into a million triangular little eggshells and from the slimy mess that is the corpse of the Deep State raise up a new and perfect society. To simplify greatly. I am not claiming anything approaching the hardcore when I say "deep". I don't know how to code.

What I like to do it just take a good long look at whatever I happen to find, and what I have happened to find includes resources for all of the above and a world's worth more. Thing is, it is very very easy to look around on internet (you just click around, that's how it works), you can go very very far without actually doing anything, and you only matter if you make yourself matter. You can get very good at knowing where to go for interesting new ideas, unusual art, and the type of news that doesn't make the news, and without wasting a ton of time typing, you can get a lot done every day.

All I can really say is that I have looked at a lot of words and pictures on internet. But when I say a lot, I mean a fucking lot. I don't even so much as surf incognito. The volume and breadth of my trawling is its own signature and its own defense. Also the stuff I check if  I'm just quick popping open the browser to do my little routine is so pedestrian it's laughable. Just picture me opening a newspaper and skipping straight to the funnies in a sunny kitchen, a cup of coffee at my elbow and my tie an affable half-windsor, my hat waiting for me on its peg and the dog content with its water dish and large white bone. A federal agent literally thinks of this man as their best customer as they go about their work.

*

Social media brought every toxic thing we learned how to hurt and troll each other with on forums into public life, right up to how our elected representatives seem and behave. That's okay. We will either digest this poison and mature as a culture or tear ourselves apart and what is left can try and learn. 

*

Okay, more internet tomorrow! Got stuff to do.

internet, internet, the world wide web, if you were really any good, you'd have gotten us Jeb!


--JL

*every time I say facebook has fucked up or done something wrong they make another billion dollars net and change society for the worse/more interesting, so this is very good for them and presumably for the blockchain. Don't say I never did nothin' for ya. I'm totally kidding about this fucking evil company ruining the world by getting directly into the money these fuckers have shown their blue-and-white sigil and it is spattered with gore and human pulp how is this company still legal why has no one stopped them fffffffffffffffffffffffffffff***

**this is why Amazon is the company that is good at irony and facebook is staffed by affectless psychopaths who think they're philosopher-rogues: facebook's most ironic thing will always be their company name, and Amazon never offers any explanation for actions which seem destructive but which over the long-term solve problems those who loudest cried "foul" on Amazon had always wanted solved and never did. Amazon continually draws pistols from its coat and points them at the forehead of the terrified consumer. Their face grim stone, Amazon pulls the trigger, and a little flag that says "BANG!" shoots out and a puppy appears in the consumer's arms. Elsewhere, a CEO's head explodes and a whole industry collapses, its ancient bones serving as a delicious and powerful fertilizer for the new economy. Meanwhile facebook changed how the things on its hell of ass website are organized and sold a picture of your kid's genitals to a German murderer while giving the sum total of your human data away for free to people who cosplay as the Illuminati. (this is a cola war scenario of course, I like Amazon better for wholly personal reasons but none of these fucks are your friends; you are their food and never forget it)

***seriously congress is all "facebook demons, are you bad?" and they tell congress, "No! We are good!" and congress is all "Then do you know how I can get my printer to talk to my screen?" and now it's all "We're gonna save the world by giving everybody money-power! Did you know that not everybody can even hold money, and this makes things bad? Now everybody can hold money, though! If someone robs you blind, we can give you more to hold, no problem!" and Visa and Spotify and lord knows who else are all "Sounds real, let's go" and everyone in the facebook building rubs their little claws together and slips their forked tongues out from between their lips.****

****ok who cares though ultimately I am being a Chicken Little about all this, get out of here and try to have a good day without thinking about internet anymore, that's my plan

#187

Ahhhh, surfing the web! Entering cyberspace! Placing your consciousness within the virtual object! Checking the Internet! Looking online! Uploading to the mainframe! And, of course, "jacking in", whether it be into the network, the matrix, or another made-up term.

Some language for whatever the fuck it is I am actually describing? You do not need it! It is amazing how few people work with an actual definition, going beyond "my computer contains the things I like, and there's like this...directory? I can send my gram-maw a smiling face made out of dots and slashes! A man put up a diagram of a carburetor that ups your fuel efficiency to ninety-eight miles to the gallon*! And this dancing baby Larry sent me on that electronic mail it has, holy shit!"

It's funny, and confusing, to those of us who like to understand things--but you do not need to understand anything in order to use it. Matter of fact, through use, those who do not comprehend what they are using often demonstrate that you do not need to understand something in order to define it and indeed even determine it.

*

When I was in high school I called coffee "jittersoup" and I named cocaine "super-powered party powder." And I spent a great deal of time on internet.

*

As in meatspace, I don't go around putting my mark on a lot of things in this world. Some dudes approach meatspace with their dicks out and a can of spray paint in each fist, and it is only natural that some dudes approach internet the same way (dudes whose dicks and fists do them precious little good in meatspace, typically, but only typically).

Me, a small area to call my own, unbounded opportunity to read, trying to fix it so I can think and look at stuff and move around pretty much how I please without the Man coming down too hard on me. Try to get some work done, for everybody's sake and for my own. Hopefully no one tries to talk to me. There is basically no difference between how I approach meatspace versus internet.

*

More about internet and its intersections of all types tomorrow! I don't want to be in my house right now. I want to go not be here before I have to be at work**. I don't know where I'm going to go. It doesn't matter. Probably the library. 

Peace out, peace in, peace for a good deed and peace for a sin

SMOKE WEED EVERY DAY

FUCK YOU IF YOU DON'T

------> jk peace <-------


--JL

*dear FBI: I never saw anything like this. I don't think such a thing can be done, and have never heard of a dude accomplishing this. This is a blog of jokes.

**as I moved the mouse over to the "publish" button, my dad came into my room with his résumé for me to proof. This did not take long, but stung me right in the place where I am still immature.

#120

Don't like conspiracy theories, personally. The minuscule sliver of them that are perfectly true and are only termed conspiracy theories because of CIA disinformation campaigns are simply not worth the rest of them, some of them also CIA disinformation. I hope it's not too crazy to make that statement; nothing I have just said is not on the public record.

*

In particular, and as always, I am thinking of and still absolutely amazed that the History Channel, which I could easily and accurately call the W.R. Hearst Legacy Channel, broadcasts the show Ancient Aliens to the viewing public. I hope Umberto Eco passed without having seen it. It is everything he writes about in his essay on Ur-Fascism, everything he talks about when he discusses critical historical misinterpretation and dangerous textual telephone in his book Serendipities, it is just plain conspiracy theory and the undermining of rational thought and empirical thinking and inductive reasoning.

If you want to know what the show Ancient Aliens is actually about, what its purpose is, and why the people who make it and the trolls that feature prominently are just irresponsible at best, get a load of this shit. Slip into the rabbit hole a ways. Learn about "Awareness" and the true story of our solar system. You're either the kind of person who will fall for it and come to believe that I am the insane one--possibly even not human--for not believing in it, or you'll understand why I'm pissed.

*

I have hazel eyes, by the way, and possess vivid memories of my childhood dreams, many of which involved being strapped to a vertical surface by shadowy figures and being pierced by a shifting but always circular pattern of individual lights like floating crystals, so bright they rayed and spangled wildly in the vision. The feeling was one of total panic and of being penetrated and rearranged internally.

So you know, this has particular significance, according to the above conspiracy theory. Makes me special. Singled out.

Still think all of that is bullshit. Come on, people. Get with a program that is called the delusion of being outside a delusion. Take a step back. Then take one more.

*

Not a very productive post. Hey, I hate the fucking teevee and the insufferable lunatic demagogues it so clearly empowers and rewards, everybody! I hate to death its infinitely hungry, ever-regurgitating, white-glowing maw! 

Of course, I am a person who has watched a lot of cartoons and PBS and HBO which is, of course, still television. I love the teevee as much as the next guy but FUCK. 

Similar to how I'm pretty much an internet person, shaped by its forces and disdainful of misunderstandings of what I believe it represents, but am absolutely disgusted by everything about the internet, loathe it and belittle it at every opportunity.

Now back to reading this "mainstream history" book I am enjoying, even though it is clearly written specifically to keep me in the dark about how the Earth is actually hollow and full of things that want to drink my blood and steal my hormones.

--JL

#89

Well, one more ellipsis round our mother star, people. Pat yourselves on the back.

Of course, this is a daily thing; every day the one-year anniversary of the last time we made it one, or ten, or two hundred and forty days of hurling nonstop through the aether, at the mercy of poorly-understood forces for a twenty-four hour period. Still. Stayed up till midnight and drank a champagne flute full of lime-flavored sparkling water, in thanks for three hundred and sixty-five days without Ragnarok, Cthulu, or instant and unexplained total oblivion, and may God grant us three hundred and sixty-five more before I have to stay up till midnight to strengthen a ward for another year.

Saw a video this morning of a huge firework landing on a penthouse fireworks party, taken from a nearby, taller building. The internet allows for me the very worst of myself.

*

However, it also lets me look at stuff like this for as long as I need to. For a little while. Every age has its private pleasures and personal agonies, which people past and future could only ever guess at, misremember, or never think about or guess at. The internet has already changed so much, I can't guarantee anything. Someday the internet might be a place where you can't look at a single picture for free, or type whatever comes into your brain into a text field. Someday you might do your typing with your neurons alone. Someday the internet will no longer be a world wide web but you will have to jack into area-governed, locally-dominated  Nodes, "tiny" local hyperserver clusters running megaclouds which guard their own precious sets closely, but allow nomadic traffic in order to harvest fresh data and build up viral immunizations.

Indeed, I think it probable that one day, most of us will be no more than nomadic traffic; wandering dollars, rootless spirits. The very few, genetically-enhanced neo-persons in gilded cages of wealth and permanence so powerful and entrenched they are unto a glittering pantheon of anti-angels, immortal and ultramaterial, the whole wide world an unimportant, barely diverting game depending on their incomprehensible whims.

*

Things to enjoy while we have them: Earth, air, water, and trees. A blue sky we can look at and stand under with a clean wind in our hair. Looking with our eyes into other people's eyes and seeing recognition, feeling recognition. Words spoken gently with a voice. The feel of a friendly animal's fur, feathers, chitin, scales, slime layer, or skin under our hands. Walking in the woods. Public art, freely available art, access to all manner of media with unprecedented ease and in unprecedented volume for an unprecedented many. Laughing at jokes. Eating real food, grown in soil, prepared by hand. Life-giving rain, clouds, and moisture. Biodiversity. The present lack of total war, multiplicity of wars notwithstanding. The present lack of catastrophic plagues. Money in your pocket and a semblance of freedom, if you're real lucky. A chance to get some, if you're not so much.

Finally, there's always worse luck out there.

*

Cool. Let's have an interesting year. Let's see what we can make of it.


--JL

#27

It's very strange, making posts to Blogger. I mean, even using a Google service is strange. I only do it because I make use of an Amazon service, namely, their publishing service, through which one may easily obtain digital copies of my books, and said service may be linked to a blogging service. This streamlining seemed like fair business dealings to me: like a little corn salesman, it is only fitting that I peddle my wares by front-facing free samples, the most old-school of cold sells, in hopes of snagging the odd, hopefully loyal stranger whose taste buds seek the nourishment I provide, and are willing to pay for something to take home and enjoy in their own way.

I myself am just such a queer wanderer; the type of person who hopes to stumble upon something like GweenBrick, reads it with deep enjoyment, and thinks it is important. I am proud to share a shitty platform with such works. Remember geocities? Remember Ulli?

The fossil known as Blogger, though. Man. I tried to let the new, rebranded Google Ads do its thing on Factually Pointless; do you see ads? I don't know. I don't think it worked. But it won't confirm or deny, and refuses to allow for further inputs.

Encouraged to create and link to a Google+ (Google Plus?) profile, I have done so, yet trying to explore Google+ defies analogy.

Well, that's not quite true. Navigating the haunted asshole that is Google+ is in fact nostalgic to me, simultaneously evoking 2003-era forums and websites upon which assorted clips of video pornography could be had for free, in layout and in navigation. But that's...wrong, isn't it, for something purportedly meant to be one of those services that link people together in a savvy, utile way in this day and age, wherein social media's sigil is burnt into the very heavens by the dark power of the heartless sorcerers that helm its throbbing temples?

Whatever their game, for something that seems to be designed to hold its own in the bowels of that black and bloodstained pit, Google+ doesn't seem to me to be engaged in any sort of competitive thrust. I think that's deceptive, though, and I believe Gweenbrick and stuff like it, such as my own stupid homebrew trash is a big part of why--because homebrew trash needs a low-key home, a place that isn't in a shitty neighborhood, doesn't look like a punk house, smell like a punk house, or advertise itself as a punk house, but where punk shows happen; where actually nobody lives there and it's just a framework for a basement where punk shows happen in front of twenty people at a time. To underline the point, scroll down far enough, and Google+ is in fact one of those old porn websites.

Go on! Search "writing", for example, in Google+, then scroll down for a minute or so, make the auto-load work. If you're the right age, you'll feel like an old frontiersman, long hemmed in by city walls, cresting an untamed horizon once again.

This evokes a crude, hardscrabble quality that lingers about the space, which the internet has by and large lost--giving way to the polish and presentation of the well-lit avenues and great plazas where the worldwide throngs gather, the circuses spout gore, and fake bread spews in half-chewed sprays of crumb from every mouth.

Once upon a time, websites were hideous affairs, tough to decipher, much of the most interesting data presented as merely a single front page with a jaypeg of a solid block of text. Practically nobody went to them, and the people who made them were hedge wizards. Now even your cousin Larry has a nice crisp header, pop-up videos, meticulously farmed content, and a soft paywall. He was able to set it all up in twenty minutes from his phone.

I remember this one guy that talked about how he got into fucking dolphins. I'm talking about swimming into the shallows of the bay to service the males with his hands to "shotgun blast" completion (long before this factoid enjoyed a high vogue) and let the females milk his johnson with their "prehensile, rippling vaginal walls, which created almost a suction as they powerfully massaged." I'm paraphrasing, but accurately, I think, as the pale yellow of his website, the careful distribution of his paragraphs, and his even, clinical tone have burned themselves into my memory.

As far as I know, while Twitter and Facebook may try to get you to try and pay a robot for sex, they mostly take the trouble to filter out virus-laden porn-pots with nipples right in the trap-frame. In Google+, all the edges may be crisp and feature no black lines, the text may not be trapped within and partially cut by unsightly table-frames or random bullet-points, but it manages to remind me of extremely rough, gigantic music files straining through your speakers as patches of comic sans shakily load around a broken image.

And it feels good. Like the sort of place where people aren't watching you too close so they can be the first to ram their yells down your throat and shame you into a wearied subjugation. Like a place where some weird, broken, unsalable shit can thrive, without a pressure economy and an aesthetics of competitive performance, be it by chaos trolls or by purity trolls, and simply be there for the weird, broken, unsalable people to find it, to make their lonely paths seem less so. I grew up turning over the web's logs to note the fungal ecology and watch the insect life crawl. It's good to contribute to such an ecosystem, when the woods have changed so much, and gone so sterile.

That's worth something ineffable to me, sad and pathetic as it is for the chumps in charge of making something that exists in 2018. I doff my cap to the team, and hope whatever changes may come, the floorboards may stay loose, and the grit remain wherever it can. I like a bit of broken drywall, some mysteriously stained carpet, and naked black cables strung along a wall. I like the low disintegrated, the tattered, the merely serviceable.

Am I using Netscape Navigator? Or are maggots eating my eyes in my fucking grave? Either way, I'm comfortable.

*

Okay, peace out everybody. I have to go figure out how to listen to the new Li'l Wayne album without paying for it or signing up for any services. I used to be capable when it came to these matters! Alas, things creep up on one, and the cool, edgy, thieving parts of the brain calcify with age before anything else. But at least I don't buy records.

My age group got conned into purchasing records somehow--records--and the players with which to scratch them with needles. We, who once scoffed at the costly, dust-collecting husks our forebears endured, those ancient and derelict compact discs. We, whose hacked iPods groaned with the weight of effortless discographies.

Our parents were the last suckers, we boasted to one another--even before the Cloud.

It's a different world, we said.


--JL