People Are All Idiots! Then What?

Gonna use ableist language in this post, obviously, but not as an endorsement, also obviously – I hope.  A common belief of misanthropes in all walks of life is that they are the lone sane or intelligent person in a world gone mad or gone stupid.  You get that a lot in comments on FtB.  Observe my comment policy in the sidebar before you bring that here, please.  I just wanted to get out an idea that’s been occurring to me a lot lately.  I’ve been running into the cognitive deficits of others pretty often, and the big plagiarism video focused a lot on the question of “why plagiarize?”  I feel these things are related.

When I say I’ve been running into the cognitive deficits of others, you might reasonably infer that I think of myself as superior to those people in intellect and worth – that I am being ableist.  But I believe you can acknowledge that somebody has a deficit in a non-ableist way, for example, when developing policies to allow the cognitively impaired full access to a good life.  It’s what you do with the observation of that fact that matters.  Do I think people are less valuable than I am because they would do worse on standardized tests?  Worse at math, reading comprehension, elementary logic?  No.

Do I think I am the end-all be-all of genius?  Fuck no, I feel the limits of my own ability to think every fucking day at my job.  It sucks.  It sucks worse for the people I deal with, and I feel bad for them.  My job is, in part, trying to explain information that makes me feel feeble-minded to people who find that information fully paralyzing.

The picture I’m starting to get, the half-baked thesis I’m dropping here, is that huge swathes of humanity are much less intelligent than society expects them to be.  We expect certain basic abilities in modern life – attention span, reading comprehension, math, awareness of cultural concepts and trivia, wit, spelling and grammar, whatever.  You might see people being slack about some of these and scoff, say there is no standard, but that’s a facile way of looking at shit.  Witness the way people get dogpiled for embarrassing themselves on social media.  These expectations are unevenly enforced, but they do exist.

(Quick aside on race and class:  I’ve talked to an upper middle class white person who was hatefully resistant to understanding the most basic aspects of the laws and policies they were dealing with, and a user of thick AAVE with multiple children dependent on social benefits -your “welfare mom”- who effortlessly intuited subtleties of the even worse laws and policies they were being subjected to.  You can’t judge cognitive ability from how educated a person sounds.)

This situation has not resulted in people rising to those standards, because they fucking can’t.  The actual result of those standards is a lot of fakery.  People learn how to pretend they’re more capable than they are.  Some buy their own act and get overconfident, but most live in terror of being discovered.  It’s not always imposter syndrome, because – if I’m right – the average person is genuinely not as cognitively capable as we expect them to be.  This is not unlike the way we expect everybody to be more slim and physically adroit than most people are capable of being.  We’re all doing our best to not get attacked for our deficits, and if I’m right, huge numbers of people passing as able right now are actually mentally deficient by mainstream standards.  They’re suffering for it.

The shittier skeptics will just mock the gullible.  The more idealistic skeptics might see this issue and think, well, we’ll just help enlighten them.  They’re right that nobody deserves to be gulled, but they’re wrong to think it’s possible for most people to reach a point of skeptical competence that will prevent it.  We’d do better to push for laws and social mores that protect people from deception.

If you see somebody struggling with some cognitive task, cut them some slack.  You’ve surely struggled with thinking at some point in your own life, or will in the future, should you experience senescence.  Don’t call attention to it, just help them get past the situation discreetly and move on.  That’s all I have for now.  I don’t believe education and outreach is useless, but it could be useful to get a more realistic view of its limitations.

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The Bacchanal

no idea what to say about these, how to explain how i arrived at them.  i just think, this might be the first time i’ve created AI images of a scene i want to be a part of, haha…

Glitchcore AI Art

My dude and I were making some AI images, and while I’ve been doing more sensible things like the image on the left, he’s been doing glitchy weirdness like the image on the right.  The one on the left is in Midjourney’s 5.2 engine, the one on the right is from a version created by and for Asian countries called Niji.  I may have some terms wrong in all that.

I tried mashing them up by using the images themselves as prompts.  Here’s just the images, in original flavor midjourney:

Here’s the same mashup, but also using the text prompt he used to get his original image set, “neon pixel art cover, in the style of horror manga, webcam photography, psychedelic manga, trick of the eye paintings, ascii art, disfigured forms”:

Here’s me switching from midj to niji, with just the images as prompt:

Then in niji with the text prompt included…

I think the winner is the last one, on the right.  The one on the left has the head duplication problem from early midjourney outputs, like a few versions back.  Kinda fun if you don’t recognize that, though.  Nonetheless, cannot hold a candle to “lascivious psychic ghoul temporarily doffs the skull mask to use third eye on you.”
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Idea for Some Content

During the October FtB Poddish Sortacast, I told a story off the cuff with nothing but a slim outline (and some personal memories) to guide me.  I feel like I did a pretty good job at it, and I enjoyed it, which has me wanting to do it again.  Great American Satan, yewchoob content creator.  I know a lot of people want words to put in their ears, while doing mindless tasks like exercise, or while trying to sleep.  Would you like to get rhapsodized by this beast?  Wanna get lulled by the dulcet tones of Satan?

More importantly, would you toss a plinky coin into a patreon for that sort of thing?  I would not have the time to make patreon exclusives happen, it’d just be an incentive for me to carve out the time for this, while I’m still making my living nine-to-fivin’ for The Man.  I promise I wouldn’t spend all day on twitter and stop producing content for years at a time like the usual leftesque yewchoob comedians do.  Pinkie swear.

If I go for it, I’d aim to do two to four videos a month, at the upper end if a story runs over to being more than one video.  Most of the time I’d do short stories like Len Ross, but sometimes I might even serialize something to low novel length.  Don’t know, we’ll see or we won’t.  I would do my best to keep the videos ad-free or at least having no mid-roll ads, assuming google’s evil asses even allow that for less than a jillion dollars a month.  Also, comments will be disabled on yt completely.  I don’t have time to moderate the mass of hate I could attract there.

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Crosspost from Tumblr

Gotta let my two followers on tumblr know I keep it real:

AnarchoTumblr Fuck Off

Leftoid tumblr in general has gotten my motherfucking goat so many times, I’m done with it.  Hell, the only reason I have a political tumblr is as a spleendump for shit that comes across my dash I feel obligated to spread.  Honestly, I’d be better off completely unplugged from the political attitude on here.

It’s funny because I know the popular tumblr funnyman types that are pushing radical left positions now were pushing fascist shit as teenagers.  They just grew up and transed up enough to realize gamergate was a mental dead end.  But they still have that 4chan influenced nihilistic fuck-the-world attitude, paired with the snooty holier-than-thou sanctimony of the very liberals they are always shitting on.

I ain’t a political liberal.  A lot of my personal beliefs are radical left, particularly by ameriKKKan standards.  But just because I believe voting dem (when there isn’t a better local alternative) is crucial harm-mitigation and shouldn’t be discouraged, these fuckoes would have you believe people like me are genocide apologist bootlickers.

There are people on this site and especially elsewhere who are either sincerely faithful in the democrats, or just feel like spreading any negativity about them at all will harm their odds at the polls.  I don’t love those positions and I try not to RB that shit, but those people are still doing much less harm to human lives than vote discouragers.

People in gerrymandered-out hell states are making moves right now, making changes that directly save human lives because they don’t buy your shit, or aren’t here to be reading it.  I’m proud of those people, even the ones who are deluded right wing assholes about other positions, because I value the lives they are saving.

The rethuglican party is a murderous death cult and every inch of power you cede to them is lives lost.  Even in red states where “your vote doesn’t count.”  It only doesn’t count until that glorious day when it does, and it’s starting to happen.

VOTE.  Crush that shit.  Smash that motherfucking like button.  After that, be as radical as you wanna be.  I don’t give a shit how many cops or shinzo abes you detonate.  Just vote first.

Right now, it’s like that.  If you discourage voting, choke to death on your own shit.  You’re spending enough time up your ass, it’s right there.  Open up and say glug.
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Meanwhile my non-political tumblr is a much better time.
The usual memes, no political crap interspersed through it.  Enjoy.

 

Making My Own LPs

As I’ve been feeling the concept of leftover people lately, I’d like to do something with them.  But I dunno, I’m pretty busy in life.  Could I make the time?  The ones I’m most inspired by at the moment are the TTRPG Kult‘s “Children of the Underworld.”  Back in the day when I was inspired by something in an RPG I’d just make a character or scenario in that RPG, but for every hundred character sheets I may have played one or two sessions.  A lot of waste.  Now I’m like, how do I steal this without stealing it, so I can use it in my personal arting or writing?

The CotU are a lil’ HR Giger, a lil’ Clive Barker.  There are comparable concepts in lots of stories.  How to make this thing mine?  Also, in the spirit of not starting new projects until I get some of the old ones done, do I have an existing project I could wedge them into?  Of my recent spooktobers, maybe Conrad’s Sojourn, maybe Josefina y Blasfemina?  I dunno. Of last year’s spooktobers, maybe Blasted?  Of the year before that, maybe Hot-Handed God of Beasts?  From MonsterHearts events, maybe Die Monstervitches?  I’m Your Turbo Lover?  Daphne?

Speaking of last year’s spooktobers and totally off topic, you can see me deliver an extemporaneous performance of Len Ross in one of the FtB podish sortacasts.

Anyhow, I percolate.  Anything you’d like to see in dismal gothique leftover peoples?
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Leftover People in Fiction

I wasn’t able to track down the 19th century book that inspired this post, but I suspect the book itself was the work of a theosophist (perhaps intentionally) over-applying the hindu concept of yugas and turning it into something more like Western concepts of magic.  Whatever, I’ll just lay out some of the things that are on my mind:

In that book, it was asserted that there is a Middle Eastern concept of cyclical creation and destruction (there isn’t as far as I can tell) wherein man’s world is god’s seventh iteration of the idea (maybe more, maybe less? don’t remember).  Holdovers from previous versions of creation include djinni, who iirc were kinda sassy about the situation.

In the TTRPG Feng Shui, which is similarly Orientalist but in a 1980s ninja ultimate power sense, there were sites in the world with cool mystical power, and whatever faction grabs the most of them gains some control over reality.  The previous owners of reality can skulk off to a netherworld outside of time to scheme a return to power.  So, like the djinni aforementioned, these guys are misfit leftovers from an earlier version of reality.

In the TTRPG Kult, something like judaeo-christian cosmology is sort-of true, but much nastier.  God, there called The Demiurge, has vanished into a hole, leaving his Archons in charge of maintaining humanity’s prison – an illusory reality called Elysium which prevents us from realizing our godhood.  There’s a lot more to the game that I won’t get into here, but central is the idea humans used to be god-like beings, running reality from an ur-city called Metropolis.  In that capacity, we were nasty ourselves, conquering other races and destroying their worlds.  The leftovers of those realities ended up – again – in some kind of netherworld slowly crumbling into an engine of oblivion called Achlys.  Reality leftovers.

It’s just an interesting idea to me – people who don’t belong in the world, persisting, watching other people prosper in their stead.  Envious?  Miserable?  Free, in a sense, but dying out.  Can you think of more examples?
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Occult Expert Needed

Trying to find a source for some half-remembered knowledge.  This is a real long shot, but I hope one of you can help out.

When I was researching demons a few years ago, I randomly came across a book (on either google books or project gutenberg) purporting to be about folklore / legends / supernatural things from the Near East / Middle East / Orient / Araby / Turkdom / something like that.  This wasn’t the Arabian Nights so don’t bother mentioning that.  Pretty sure it wasn’t a different work by the same author.  I apparently failed to bookmark it and I’m pissed at myself.

Anyway, I don’t need the book if somebody can just give me any kind of source or citation for the idea I’m remembering from it.  Supposedly, per that author, there is an idea in the Middle East that this is not god’s first creation.  Basically, dude makes universes for kicks and destroys them when they don’t work out, and we’re up to the sixth or later version of reality.  Djinni are leftover from a previous world, in that paradigm.

So is this something anybody has ever believed or conjectured in the Arabic or Farsi spheres?  Is it some Theosophist ass-pull?  Was the author just being unusually creative for the 1800s?  Googling this is tricky because there is so much religious and scifi-fantasy BS (same diff?) polluting results.  Seems like there may be some ideas about cyclical creation and destruction from further east (India) but I’m pretty sure this was a book about Middle Eastern beliefs, even if it didn’t use modern terms for it.
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