Thursday, June 25, 2009

The Worst Forum Ever

I would just like to point out that the Principia Discordia forum is the worst forum on the internet.

The Principia Discordia forum is the worst forum ever.

The Principia Discordia forum is the suckiest forum on the web.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Concerning The Immediate Future

There is no 'solution.' This crisis will not be 'fixed.' A few of its symptoms will be alleviated, a little bit. Maybe. For some people.

An uncaring and uncontrolled juggernaut of changes will run its course across the fields of humanity, leaving ruin, death, poverty, and confusion in its wake. No, it is running its course as I write this. It cannot be stopped, slowed, or hastened to its destination. It will have its way with us before the survivors are left to build yet another empire from the rubble.

And we shall make up a story or two explaining why it all happened, what we did wrong, and how to avoid such things in the future. But it won't make a lick of difference because it's too late and we're fucking hopeless when it comes to finding out where the next juggernaut is coming from.

This is not the end of days, nor even the end of civilization. Do not be so optimistic. Humanity has prophesied its own demise a thousand times in the hopes that the next big catastrophic clusterfuck will be the last one we have to struggle through. The doomsayers are the hopeful ones; once humanity is destroyed or reduced to barbarism it won't have to live with memories of the disasters it can't believe it didn't see coming, and the torturous knowledge that it will happen again. And again, and again.

But humanity is big, dumb, and resilient. It cannot be destroyed, not even by its own hands. It shall lumber along as it always has, clumsily and nearly-blind, crawling and drooling its way into the future.

There will be another huge fucking disaster; a maelstrom of blood, anger, and misery. And when the dust settles we'll have lots and lots of dead people and still no answers.

It's what we do.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Pain In The Neck

For over a year now, I have had a chronic muscle spasm in my neck, on the left side. For about six months I couldn't turn my head to the left. It didn't just hurt to turn it that way; I physically could not do it without turning my body. During that time I was supposed to be learning to drive... hah! Driving without being able to look over your left shoulder, right.

I never injured my neck in any way. No sprains, strains, or pulled muscles. The muscles just started turning to stone for no discernible reason.

I went to a massage therapist for several sessions a few month ago, and while they helped slightly, the problem wasn't going away. Finally, a course of treatments from a chiropractor adjusted my neck so that I could move it properly again. My C4 vertebra had been pulled out of alignment by the spasm. I figured that with my neck back in alignment, I could expect the spasm to finally subside as long as I remembered to stretch and relax the muscles in question.

No such luck. The stiffness and pain have simply spread to accommodate the entire left side of my back as well. I can still turn my head properly, but every day I am at a near-constant low level of pain. Any movement which pulls on the area reminds me of this persistent, infuriating problem. Some days it flares up and just plain hurts, regardless of what I'm doing. That's when I start getting angry.

If I were forty years old, it would be a different story. However, I am not forty, or even thirty. I am eighteen years old. By all accounts, I should feel invincible and vigorous.

I don't feel invincible. I don't even feel healthy. I feel like a cripple and a weakling. Stretching, heat pads, fancy memory foam neck pillows--at the end of the day it's ibuprofen that lets me get to sleep when it's bad.

What is this bullshit? I'm not old, or injured, or deformed. I just hurt all the damn time. I can't move without being reminded that there's something wrong with me that I can't fix, and it's eating me up. It's pain with no gain, pain that's just there to remind me that I'm frail and there's nothing I can do about it.

Monday, February 9, 2009

"Twilight" Vampirism Is Bullshit

Vampires are allowed to have the following powers:

1) Faster and stronger than humans, but not superhuman
2) If the vampire in question is Dracula, then he can shape-shift into a bat or wolf (iirc)

And that's it.

Vampires are also required to have the following weaknesses:

1) Daylight fucking KILLS them. DEAD. Circumventing this is not fucking allowed.
2) Garlic
3) Wooden stake through the heart
4) Catholic stuff


Granting extra powers or removing weaknesses disqualifies them as vampires. They become fantasy fanwankery if they break the rules, and it becomes necessary to mock them endlessly. Being a vampire is supposed to be a curse, damn it, not a level-up.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Allow Me To Be Perfectly Frank...

I do not understand the motivation behind most spiritual inquiry.

Countless theologians, philosophers, and lay thinkers have been and continue to be obsessed with what is often considered the ultimate question: "Why are we here?"
Alternate forms of the question include, "What is our purpose?", "Why are things the way they are?", and "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

I admit that I spend a great deal of time reading about and trying to understand the nature of religion and belief (which are not the same thing, and I would highly recommend The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse to anyone who wants to know what the hell I mean by that), but the nature of that question eludes me. In my mind, the ultimate question is not "Why are we here?", instead it's "What the hell kind of a question is that?"

What do people mean when they ask this question? From my perspective, it has no relevance or bearing on anything; it is inanity at it's highest. Yet many people will spend their lives looking for the "answer" to this meaningless question, and many will spend their lives touting that they have found it. However, the answers that people come up with are so many and varied that it becomes readily apparent that the original question is flawed.

Seriously, did no one but me get the joke about "The Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything" in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? They built the most advanced supercomputer ever to give them the answer to this question, and the supposed "true" answer was 42. Then they had to build another, bigger supercomputer to give them the actual question, so that the answer would make sense. Get it? It's funny because the people looking for the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything didn't know what the hell they were actually asking for! Just like in real life!

People often talk about "purpose" and "meaning." They talk about needing a purpose, or that life would be meaningless without God or whatever spiritual entity they are concerned with. I don't get it. If there ever was a "fall from grace," it was the loss of our ability to have the nerve to face life with some sense of personal dignity and authority over ourselves. Why do people need to have a purpose assigned to them, and how can one be so asinine as to think that a dream, an epiphany, or simply a moment of mania is a message from a Greater Power™ telling them what to do with their lives? That kind of thinking is for people who took The Alchemist seriously.

If you can't assign a purpose to yourself, or just LIVE and be happy doing whatever the fuck you feel like at any given time, then you are dragging your knuckles. Walk upright and be a human being, damn it all. Have enough self-respect and courage to face life and say "Whatever I do in life, I do under my own will and by my own authority."

Please. You people are so terribly confounding and annoying when you blather on about "purpose" and "meaning" and "Why," and then look down on people like me who, quite frankly, don't see why those things are of such concern to you. Maybe you'd start being more satisfied with yourself if you started asking different questions, rather than beating your head against the imaginary brick wall that is "Why are we here?"

Monday, October 20, 2008

The Lost & Found of Your Life

Behind the oaken door lay a hallway lined with small, intricate wooden cabinets. I checked the piece of paper in my hand: underneath my name was written the number of my cabinet, J-2312. I walked down the hall to the little door with a brass plaque that bore the same number. As I raised my hand to the handle of this little door that supposedly held everything I had ever lost in my life, I wondered foolishly to myself if I would find in there the ball cap I had lost when I was thirteen that I had liked so much. I opened the cabinet door.

Not quite what I had expected. The single largest item in there was a thick, plain, leatherbound book. I took hold of it, noting the lack of a title or any markings whatsoever. I was bemused; when had I lost such a thing? I could not remember, and I cracked open the fresh cover.

Inside were dated entries, scores and scores of them starting from the time I was about threee years old. Each entry was a lost thought, a moment of inspiration, or epiphany that I had forgotten. Pages upon pages of ideas I had meant to act on, both good and bad.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Stuck In A Thick Plot

"No. This is too stupid."

Richard tossed the door key onto the ground and stormed away, stopping at the sidewalk corner to stare up into the street light and sigh.

"Richard, come on. I know this shit is dumb, but if we don't do it something else will just come up. Every time we give up, we get sucked into something else. Let's try and see this one through." Erin picked up the key and put it in her pocket.

"No, Erin. I'm sick of this crap. I don't think it's ever supposed to stop. I think that this stupid... whatever the hell it is... will just keep going on forever, and then when we finally give up on it something new will start. At least these moronic little plots are interesting at first glance; why bother running them into the ground? It's like a cheesy fiction series that goes on for twenty novels that started out okay but got run into the ground by greed and a childish enthusiasm for hearing the same story repeated over and over again, only with minor variations so the reader can pretend they're getting something new."

There was a sick, unhappy little pause. Richard's description was all too apt. For almost a year now, their lives had followed a bizarre and only barely coherent path that no one could take seriously, not even they who were living it. A year of meaningless adventures and pointless escapades had worn them down into rather bitter and cynical characters who went into every new venture fully expecting it to be nowhere near as exciting, important, or serious as it first appeared. Worse still, they no longer knew who to trust in the world, besides each other. People came into their lives all of a sudden and disappeared just as fast, seeming only to exist for as long as they had anything to do with them. Recently, a certain Gerald Mannington had remained fairly consistent, and appeared to be experiencing the same weirdness they were. Still, they kept him at arm's length, half-expecting him to disappear and never pick up his phone again if they should choose to drop out of the chain of events they were currently engaged in.