What is The "Fantasy" Genre?

I recently watched a few videos by the band "Castle Rat".

The lead singer is a pretty woman in her prime, and wears a skimpy outfit, but apart from the side boob and butt cheeks in the videos, the compelling thing about them is nostalgia for 1970s/1980s Sci-Fi and Fantasy media from that era. It really takes me back. It's like a Frank Frazetta painting come to life. I can smell the used book store scent in my mind.

I'm not sure how that aesthetic continued on to the present day so the artistic style of a band made up of people born maybe in the late 1990s or early 2000s would be steeped in it. I stopped paying as much attention to the fantasy genre by the time I was a junior in high school and was learning to drive. 

One of my good school friends and I are still in touch regularly and both were into the sword and sorcery stuff in the middle school years and occasionally reminisce about it. I was really steeped in that realm of concepts for a few years from maybe from around 1982 until 1986 or so. We played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons back then, and it was sort of part of the "job" to read and steep in the lore of the overall genre.

The sword and sorcery fantasy realm is another instance of a very detailed "shared hallucination" as is evidenced by the Castle Rat videos which draw on the shared visual vocabulary of that genre. My friends and I sort of lived in that fantasy realm and visited the "real world" of school and the like from the age of about 12-14 maybe 15 at the latest. We also had a "real world" version of the fantasy realm, like exploring caves and cliffs in our neighborhoods in Munson or having a campfire at the end of the day of exploring and hanging out.

All that stuff was pretty fun and interesting. I'd say, in general, "real life" failed to measure up. This is a really common scenario, by the way. Most people I know seem to vastly prefer their LARPs and hobbies to their jobs and the day to day grind of life.

The fantasy genre is really ancient, of course, it goes back to the oldest known recorded story: The Epic of Gilgamesh so it seems likely people had a similar fantasy versus the drudgery of normal life split in their minds. Anyway, it's interesting to ponder what people are "really doing" with such a pastime. The woman in the Castle Rat videos is acting out concepts that people have in their heads for thousands of years, like walking around in the woods with a sword or bow and arrow drawn and ready to fight some mysterious foes.

A lot of hobbies that aren't really obviously related to something like the fantasy genre exist in a similar realm of mind, like Mountain Biking or Road Biking are that for me. An MTB ride is a little adventure excursion and battle against various forces and trying to rack up experience points, basically.

Hyper Frenetic Tech Industry

Bicycles are my go to example for how new technology actually, really "wins" and becomes part of the civilization toolkit. There's an innovation process and a winnowing process constantly at work, so over time "truth" is revealed and the stuff that's no good ends up in the trash can of bike history.

For example, there's a constant parade of "bottom bracket" designs. (The bottom bracket is the part that holds the cranks in a bike frame.) They all appear to "work" initially, but then suffer from real world problems, like they creak too much, or are too hard to install or remove, or require tight tolerances during manufacturing, etc... These problems don't show up in an engineering lab and are only revealed through use.

By contrast, the tech industry has no winnowing process now. New stuff comes out at such a frenetic pace that it's not really possible to even evaluate in depth. At my job, I'm currently thinking through an approach for a new gizmo. The approaches of like 5-10 years ago are hopelessly obsolete junk. There's myriad new stuff that's better. However, by the time I might prototype and propose a scheme, it'll already be old and maybe surpassed.

This is a novel scenario in my tech career. In the early 2000s, the shelf life of approaches to product designs might last 5 years or more. Now it's like 6 months at most. The things that are just a few years old but already obsolete can have a Weekend at Bernie's zombie existence and endless unwilling minions that maintain and operate them.

This is an unnatural state of affairs because there's endless money for tech projects but of course there's limited energy, natural resources, and human time and interest. Everything in the natural world is cyclical, and the cycles are hard wired into people's minds and bodies.

Elon Musk is the public persona associated with this scenario. The Elon character always proposes wacky tech plans and gets endless investment. It's not clear if the stuff he's financed is really viable long term, like SpaceX or Starlink, etc... Several companies he owned/promoted failed, but apparently it doesn't matter. Some ideas he promotes are retarded, like space AI data centers, but people pretend like its a good idea because "it might work" and be the "next big thing".

The frenetic behavior associated with the tech industry is like aversion to opportunity cost or commitment of resources, but actually is an opportunity cost itself. As everyone chases the next big thing, they leave the previous projects partially finished. There's an accumulation of losses and debts in financial terms which manifests as severe loss of purchasing power for the average joe and jane's dollar.

Mega-distortions of History

When I was in middle school I had a couple of books called "The Penguin Atlas of World History". The books were printed on an unusual, fairly dense paper, and were kind of small but heavy for their dimensions. Unfortunately, they were also bound in a kind of slipshod fashion and eventually they fell apart because I read them frequently. They basically told a story of "the world of men" in maps. I was always particularly fascinated with the so called "age of migration" in the early medieval world when european people were moving around because it was presented as a sort of "beginning" point of europe, therefore of my ancestors.

However, even when I was 12 or so, that didn't make any sense for very basic reasons. It was an entirely arbitrary "beginning" because of course those people who migrated to europe came from somewhere else and in fact europeans had been living in that region for tens of thousands of years prior, so the narrative was nonsensical. I read and re-read the sparse text of that book to try to understand what I was missing, but never found it.

The reason I didn't find it was the info in the book was presented out-of-context because the authors of that book were Germans and they were presenting "the official narrative" they learned in school which conflated "the beginning" of europe with its christianization. For example former President of France Charles deGaulle said:

"For me, the history of France begins with Clovis, elected as king of France by the tribe of the Franks, who gave their name to France. Before Clovis, we have Gallo-Roman and Gaulish prehistory. The decisive element, for me, is that Clovis was the first king to have been baptized a Christian. My country is a Christian country and I reckon the history of France beginning with the accession of a Christian king who bore the name of the Franks."

There's a specific mega-distortion in histories that for whatever reason I tuned into at the age of 12 or so. Historical narratives are presented as a necessary sequence of events with rational causes and effects rather than entirely contingent and arbitrary outcomes. The "official" narratives are carefully crafted lies that are trademarked by the ruling class and inculcated into the population via schools in the present day. A "good student" is just a parrot. Even in a nominally "free" society while an individual can say or write almost anything they want, only the ruling class opinions, that is, the official story is set on blast.

When I was looking at those maps of medieval europe as a 12 year old kid, I was trying to figure out why the europeans abandoned their prior religion and became "christians". No such explanation is in that book because it's understood as a necessary "watershed" moment. Over the subsequent decades of my life, I tried many times to research the subject, but no authors presented it in a manner that makes sense to me, that is, it was an entirely contingent thing and the current timeline is really a series of arbitrary outcomes.

One obvious example of that in the historical record is the early version of christianity in Europe was so called "Arian" christianity, but that was replaced with a different trademarked version of christianity--catholic christianity. It seems pretty likely the catholics murdered the guy who had the trademark on Arian christianity. To this day catholics recite the "nicene creed" which commemorates how the "church fathers" settled the beefs they had 1700 years ago with poison.

Another more recent version of this historical distortion is found in the history of the settlement of Ohio. In retrospect, the outcome was always "up in the air" and often times events were farcical, such as the French claims on "ownership" of the New World which turned into British Claims, then American Claims. Each claim was based on a prior fraud, and the ostensibly "competing" governments colluded to bolster their legitimacy. Of course, this lesson can't be taught in a school even though it's the most important lesson of that era.

In other words, the claim of History as a subject is: things came to be as they must, that is, they were pre-ordained and the current order of the world is "just" because it won. This is how the "christianization" narrative is presented in many books, even by secular scholars. I recall reading a book that presented christianity "winning" out in darwinian fashion over the prior religion. Some authors make bizarre claims that became really widespread like christianity "created" the concept of being an individual that is the "content" of the christian religion won out over the content in the germanic religions because it was intrinsically better.

That's not what happened at all. Christianity's the ultimate example of something that's entirely contingent and arbitrary. For example, the "core" of christianity is actually Greek philosophy, but because it started off as a jewish cult it's associated with the bible which some modern religious christians still regard as a historical narrative rather than a collection of Mediterranean world myths. Both the jews and the greeks had been absorbed into the roman empire and as rome collapsed as an organized political/military entity its religious institutions morphed into the "Roman Catholic" church.

As with the "settlement of Ohio" narrative, because all the parties involved were weak AF, the series of events that followed, like the "baptism of Clovis I" was all pretty arbitrary and could have turned out any number of ways. Two weak players, Clovis and the early catholic church partnered up to bolster each other, but any number of other gangsters of that era could have buddied up and formed a winning combo. The search for an answer "why they won" as in, it was a necessary outcome, is an ex post facto distortion. It really "just happened to work out".

A very weird modern wrinkle on this "necessary cause and effect" narrative is the variations introduced by women's studies or black people studies or native american studies. That is the "official ruling class narratives" are now ammended with mentions of a woman, or a black, or whatever, but the overall theme remains the same. For example, one uncomfortable fact of French settlement of the new world is the Indians bartered their women's beavers to the French like they bartered their beaver pelts and in fact, they did it in gratuitous fashion. Basically the women would put on a strip-club type show and offer up their asses since they didn't share a language. The leadership of the Indians basically pimped out their hoes for material gain. The narrative has to be altered to make this a woman-power move.

The core of all this bullshit is to make it seem like the world is as it must be, which is of course what the ruling class people want everyone to believe. The reality is its entirely contingent and nobody can really make a claim on "legitimacy". It just doesn't exist.

Perpetual Psychosis

There is a plaque in Fairport Harbor that commemorates the French explorer La Salle's trip through the area in the 1600s. 

Nations like France would base their claims of ownership of vast territories on some French dude setting eyes on it first. That was the "Doctrine of Discovery". The dude would often perform a ceremony of some kind as well, like erecting a cross or installing a lead plaque, or some other such thing. They would also make these claims to the Indians in various ceremonies, presumably in French, but I don't know that for sure.

At the time, and definitely in retrospect, such claims were absurd yet grown ass men who were officials of a government earnestly made those claims after much trouble and expense and years of their lives. Those claims were joined with the construction of forts, which were basically part of the beaver pelt trade network the French built. Other nations, like the British, would sometimes dismiss those claims as nonsense, and sometimes would acknowledge them as the basis of treaties for transfer of "ownership" of a region. The Americans, also would acknowledge these claims, for example, in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the government paid Napoleon millions of dollars for land the French couldn't really defend anymore when they could have just stated the original claim was null and void because it was nonsense.

Another element of these claims was the non-Christian people had no legitimate claims to anything, even their own personal sovereignty. This was a legalism pronounced by the Catholic church very early on in the age of spanish and portuguese imperialism, which presumably continued on during the french empire's expansion into the fur trade. This claim was absurd from the start, but even moreso after the reformation, which called bullshit on the vatican's copyright on christianity.

Anyway, this all seems nuts to a modern person who might, instead, at least prefer the Dutch/Jew empire approach to "buying" land from Indians with a box of beads, a couple of guns and some booze, oh and also a big piece of paper with some legalisms, aka a contract even if they recognize that's also nonsense. That's the approach the American government eventually adopted as well, which became its policy via Henry Knox during the very early days of the US.

What that generally meant was wealthy cronies involved in the land deals could cash in on bulk land sales to the masses of european settlers when they moved into an area like Ohio or Indiana or Illinois and in fact they, that is the mass of middle class people, truly established sovereignty over an area and implemented "the system".

Another more practical and pragmatic "doctrine" for establishing government claims of ownership to Indian land was the "well, they aren't doing anything with it" claim. That is, since land wasn't surveyed, cleared, cultivated and was in a wild state, nobody owned it, which of course was most of the land in the US since the Indian's economic system and pattern of land use was totally different than the europeans' model. Obviously the use patterns were incompatible which eventually caused much destruction of the Indian population and wildlife in the US.

Let's take a step back to those French "explorers" of the 17th century and their state of mind to make nonsensical claims on behalf of a "king". It's psychotic, meaning, totally divorced from reality, yet it's a psychosis they managed to impose on, at the time, untold thousands of people. The "Sixty Years War" battle for the Old Northwest was really a battle of insane people over whose psychotic episode would be adopted by the masses.

COVID was a great current day example of that. 80% of people around the world adopted the insane, manufactured, scripted perspective sold by a piece of shit human like Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci. I saw friends and family eat that lie up and become a little violent authoritarian creep who wanted to inject people with COVID vaccines by force, even though so many people had that cold before the magic juice was ready. I had out of body experiences during discussions with people about the absurdity of Billy Gates involvement in the farce. I knew Bill was a turd even before the depth of his association with Epstein's cult/mafia were revealed. For some reason average Joe people thought Bill Gates was a credible spokesman for COVAIDs.

I eventually realized it's pointless hoping normie people will "wake up". They never will. They're so accustomed to being psychotic that they'll immediately transfer to the next imaginary thing like an election and a battle between two dirtbag politicians/lawyers and won't even notice nothing changes when the new guys come into office.

COVID followed the Dutch/Jew Empire pattern, by the way, which is why it's such a bummer that the masses are insane retards. That is, the evil wizards/scammers create an imaginary system that the mass of people actually cement into "reality" the same way a box of beads and a piece of paper could create a new State.

Long term patterns

This weekend, our well pump died. I would have preferred to just call somebody and have them replace it, but an emergency plumber or well service would cost several thousand dollars for what's actually a pretty simple DIY repair, so I resigned myself to spending a good portion of Saturday replacing it. It was actually simple since the original installers did a good job, but was still time consuming because there are several steps involved and it all needs to be done carefully for obvious reasons. I'll buy a backup pump and a couple of nice-to-have well pump removal tools in case I have to do it again in the future.

I believe most of the households in my neighborhood have the skills and tools to fix their own stuff like that as well. At least half the households have at least a farm tractor. A number of them have metal working equipment. Some have heavy equipment like an excavator. People rent lifts and take down their own trees, etc... People don't do their own work because they're poor; some of the people have or had a fancy job, like a tech executive or an executive at a tool company or whatever. I think they're a bunch of extremely competent people.

That pattern likely goes back several generations. It does in my family. As I got into my 40s, I realized I was replicating the pattern my grandfather and great grandfather followed by setting up a "hobby farm" mainly because I don't really trust "the system". The "hobby farm" and the competent family is a pretty old scenario. It is and was the typical scenario in the Northern US, and also in several European countries. In the north of the US, the typical scenario for hundreds of years since Europeans settled the continent was  a smallish "subsistence farm" which would provide some portion of necessities, maybe an income, plus a clever person might be able to do some type of value added labor as a small business, or maybe go work for others. The Amish people who live in my area follow this same pattern today.

In the southern US states, though, the plantation system created an aristocratic slave economy. The southern US could grow "cash crops" that were easily monetized by exporting them to Europe. Most of those crops were bulk commodities, like cotton, tobacco, sugar, or whatever, so the money-making model that "worked" was slave labor + giant plantation with minimal overhead. That enabled bankers and other "investors" in Europe to make money with their money by financing such operations too.

I was curious if this scenario persists today, and indeed, it does, though the regional differences get less stark as the generations go by. One bit of evidence for this pattern is the patents per capita by state in the US. There's an obvious split to this day. Basically the subsistence farmers turned into factory workers, engineers, etc... through the industrial revolution. The slave economy of the south, though formally destroyed almost 200 years ago, still affects the pattern of activity and investment in those states many generations later.

Note that "subsistence farming" like the northerners did 200 years ago was replaced with "subsistence factory work", that is a j-o-b, just over broke.

Another pattern that goes way back in the northern US is there is an often uneasy relationship between the wealthy "merchant class" and the northern farmer types who choose to help those people out with their businesses and schemes, versus slaves who were compelled into work. The US federal government serves as a proxy for the northern merchant interests and schemes.

It's interesting the southern plantation class was super influential early on in the US; many of the so called founders of the US were Virginia planters. The plantation owners' influence waned quickly after the very early days of the United States. Really it seems like the "Articles of Confederation" was the southern oriented organizing document of the US, then the US Constitution was the norther oriented one, even though the institution of slavery persisted for a while. 

The "MAGA" movement is a great example of the uneasy relationship between the merchant class people, like Trump and his cronies, and the average dude. The merchant class wanted to reduce labor costs in the US and establish a new type of slavery by importing workers from overseas, or shipping jobs overseas. That undercut wages for the past 50 years. Periodically the merchants have to give the northern farmer types "a new deal". Trump's administration seems like a fraudulent new deal scenario. Some lip service is given to the concerns of the citizenry while the overall screw job of the merchant class continues and even significantly accelerated under Trump.

In the early US there was a conflict between northern subsistence farmer populations and the plantation owner/slave society. Slavery was ostensibly kept out of the "north" for moral reasons, but it was really about the subsistence farmers' ability to make a living. The idea that people who were wiping out the Indians were "moral" about blacks is pretty stupid.

Anyway, it's interesting these patterns last such a long time.

"Legitimacy": the Cornerstone of Fraud

The human mind, like the human body is actually quite limited. For example, some religions prattle on about "eternal life", but people's bodies and minds are in a state of perpetual change and flux, or people have words like "infinite" but the brain considers anything more than 3 "a lot". Another similar concept is "legitimacy" which is at the heart of almost every hierarchical organization, certainly almost every government, even the most despotic governments on Earth claim a "rightful" beginning and reason to continue.

"Legitimate" authorities get people into wars repeatedly, like in Russia and Ukraine right now. The appropriate thing for the people of those countries to do is utterly obliterate their governments and start over. It's astounding that normal people "go to war" on behalf of the creeps and villains in their capital cities.

Maybe 10 or 15 years ago, I got interested in the history of the state of Ohio, specifically the "frontier" period and early statehood. I read up on the treaties that established the "ownership" of the state by, ostensibly, "the government", but it was really a proxy for some east coast psychopath/connected families, which is still true today even though the US is ostensibly a "republic". Anyway, even a pretty casual study of the treaties exposes how scammy they are, in fact they're sort of a magic trick.

The core of the magic trick is, ironically enough, the claim that the Indians "owned" the land that was subsequently incorporated into the US and sold off by wealthy people. Another ingredient was "war". People imagine the people in such a war are all divvied up into "sides", when at the time, the "wars" in the Ohio country were on the scale of high school football games with guns, bows and arrows and knives. Whites and Indians had all sorts of relationships in that era for many years, really centuries prior to the existence of the federal government, and that continued through the era of "wars" that established the "ownership" of Ohio by the feds and some east coast crime families.

Anyway, the "war" leads to a "treaty", yet another fraud, which is basically the end of the magic trick. A couple rando Indians are recognized as President of Indian land. Their signatures on a piece of paper with appropriate ritualistic nonsense form the basis for transferring ownership from the State to private hands via some wealthy family middlemen. Once the masses "buy" the land, they really ratify the treaty that is, they make it "real", while the conmen who setup the whole scheme just put on a big show.

In fact, the settlement of Ohio provides a great example of how that really works, because the state remained contested for several years after some rando Indian dudes signed a piece of paper in Greenville in 1795. Americans didn't move to Ohio in large numbers until after the war of 1812.

In retrospect, had the Indians really understood the scenario they faced, they could have flipped the script on the east coast "ruling class" trash families and just sold off their own land to european settlers. No doubt the east coast British descended mafiosi trash would have staged false flags and similar schemes all along the way, but had the Indians been organized and had leaders with foresight, they could have opened up settlement via the Great Lakes.

Maps and Mental Geography

I recently noticed a USGS benchmark near the intersection of Route 608 and Pearl Road in Hambden Township. Some of the benchmarks were embedded in a boulder, some were mounted to public buildings, like the Chardon Courthouse steps used to have one, and some were mounted in a cast concrete pillar, that presumably went down to bedrock.

Those benchmarks are a relic of the analog era and are no longer used because they're not accurate. For example, the one by Pearl Road is on an angle. Maybe something hit it, or freeze thaw cycles moved it over the decades. There's another one I took a picture of. It's near the Exit of the Hambden Cemetery also along route 608. It's barely legible, and it is also slightly off axis.

Since 2006, the benchmark locations are no longer even marked on the USGS topographic maps. If you want to find one today, you need to go to the historic USGS topo maps website. For example, this 1994 map includes one marked BM 1343 (feet), which was near my childhood home in Munson Township. It was there in the mid 1980s, but as far as I know, it no longer exists.

 

The benchmarks were a physical expression of state authority and part of an otherwise invisible mathematical and algorithmic system for establishing property lines and the like. As such, the markers include a nastygram message to not mess with them; some even include verbiage about fines and jail time.

Now, the invisible property line system is electronic and quite elaborate, and probably significantly more expensive than the old one, which was operated and maintained by literal boots on the ground. It's instructive to delve into the topic in detail if you ever have the need, or are sufficiently curious, but I won't do that here.

The main function of this system is to consistently represent map locations in terms of spherical coordinates, like GPS latitude and longitude coordinates. As a result of this system, anyone who plots a point on a map can go and walk to it in the physical 3D reality world. If you look at aerial photography via google maps or a county auditor web site, or the USGS maps, the same point on the ground maps to the same set of coordinates. This system is actually defined "by statute", which in this particular case is algorithmic and mathematical, but also somewhat arbitrary.

There are more and more of these types of systems cropping up into the real world, that is, a system that's really "algorithmic" or that exists in a computer somewhere, but also has a real world expression. The Flock corporation cameras are a good example of that. This stuff will be creeping into everyone's life over the next few years. Essentially a bunch of shitbird crooks and corporations will claim "ownership" of this or that thing and start new rent seeking scams, or new "enclosure movements" and lay claim to previously un-owned stuff.

Anyway, the thing I really wanted to point out in this post is the vast difference between these systems, even something like a map and associated geodetic models, and the mental model people use. For example, if you go for a walk in the woods on a well known trail, you "know" the trail as a string of essentially 1D places all tied together by your footsteps. When I ride on the big creek park mountain bike trail, even though I've done the thing like dozens of times, I don't generally know where I am with-respect to a map of the area, but I know the order of the features I'll ride over.

There are many more elaborate forms of mental geography like emotional associations, or giving a place a personality that don't show up on a map at all. For example, in our local Geauga County legend of "the melonheads" Wisner Road is scary and spooky, or the Lundgren Barn in Kirtland where a cult killed a family used to be considered spooky and foreboding for many years after that event.

The park "Hell Hollow" is another great example of mental geography. People often associated low spots with a decent into the underworld, and often think of Hell as cold and still say "It's as cold as hell out there", which was a feature of the Germanic mythology of Hel, rather than the "fire and brimstone" Hell of the christians, which I guess never fully caught on with the Germanic peoples.

Canonical Folklore

Stories of "the gods" were campfire stories at some point, and were often based on the characteristics of planets and constellations. A god like osiris in egypt was associated with the constellation Orion which is visible in the winter, then "dies" in spring when the crops are growing. And in those stories, somehow the character associated with some bright lights in the night sky came to be seen as the "sun" on earth as grain.

It seems plausible that people working and living in the field of agriculture would be interested a character like Osiris, while people engaged in other activities of life would be less so, like someone who was a hunter wouldn't care that much about it, or someone who was a builder wouldn't either.

There are characters associated with each of these concerns throughout the different mythological systems, like there are numerous historical builder and blacksmithing gods like the greek Hephaestus or the egyptian Ptah. It seems plausible these different characters filled the same role a modern mascot or advertising character does today.

At some point these stories transform from folklore created and maintained by randos to copyrighted, "canonical" stories under control of the ruling class people of a given region and era. One way that might happen is via public festivals and holidays where the god mascots are in parades and public processions and that kind of thing.

Also, simply by being a popular story and a popular character the ruling class slime of any given era would see the value of these characters as a proxy for the public and controlling it. The mere concept that some aspect of a story is "correct" and canonical while any other version of a story is blasphemy or heresy or whatever is a very basic way to condition people that the dirtbags in power are in control of "all".

Another common ruling class ploy associated with claims of a canonical folklore and its god characters is that the ruling class and its priesthood serves as the intermediary to the god characters based on knowledge and expertise about rituals and sacrifices and all that bullshit. When things are going poorly for the corporate entity of the state and the fortunes of the people are down, like crop failures or plagues happen, they can blame the people for not honoring the gods correctly, or not sacrificing enough to them or whatever.

Amazingly, all this same crap goes on today in an even more strident manner than prior eras and there's a ham fisted attempt to control even comic book characters and popular entertianment on behalf of ruling class chock full of pervs and weirdos like Bill Gates.

World Model that Includes a "Grain God"

The dominant model of the 3D reality world today is the based on the "god of forces", which really isn't a "god" at all in the traditional way. The "deist" concept from the Enlightenment Age sums it up pretty well, where "the creator" made up the rules of gravity, electricity, etc... then set the world in motion, but otherwise has no role in reality.

In prior epochs of the mind, people had a significantly different model of reality that was almost entirely based on what we'd term literary or poetic concepts like "synedoche" or allegories, or similes and metaphors where one thing was understood in terms of another, or where a long story would be referred to by a pithy phrase because everyone knew the story.

These two mental models are significantly different, obviously. The "god of forces" mindset seeks to model the world on first principles and insists any other model of reality is inherently wrong. The goal really seems to be to imitate the "god of forces" by recreating the universe in a computer based on the secret mathematical code of the universe, which is, if you think about it, the ultimate compression algorithm.

An example of the "god of forces" mindset is how the science of biology model of animals is "meat robot", which is why psychopathic trash people torture beagles or rabbits or whatever in "experiments" about diseases or to test some useless consumer product crap like eye makeup or whatever. The common sense understanding of animals is labeled as incorrect, that is assigning human qualities to an animal in some weird, arbitrary hierarchy that's also associated with this version of trash human. In recent years people earned PhDs by providing "scientific proof" of the common sense understanding of how animals behave and think, e.g. they have languages or can reason or dream or whatever.

The poetic universe mental model isn't reductive, it's a sometimes pleasant or pretty conceptualization of what happens in terms of human experience of reality. I think the grain god metaphor is a great example. The "grain god" like Osiris is akin to the Michelin Man who's the cartoon representation of "tireness". 

A character like osiris was a cartoon embodiment of grain. There's a poem by Robert Burns "John Barleycorn" that discusses the personified grain that becomes whiskey which is a good riff on this overall approach.

How did that mental model come to be and what is it? If the "god of forces" mental model came from reductive thinking about the universe that ended up in "peer reviewed" published works, where did the poetic model originate?

I think it's basically "folklore" that got really structured, mainly through repetition. If you live someplace with local legends, like here in Geauga County, Ohio there's a story of "The Melonheads" which I learned in high school, it's easy to see how folklore passes from generation to generation and slowly boils down to a handful of basic archetypal characters and narratives.

Another "local" folklore concept is "the devil's icebox". People in the 1800s realized some low nooks and crannies in local sandstone formations would remain cold and even snow filled far into spring. A number of these places would be get labeled as a "devil's icebox". There's a park in Northeast Ohio called "Hell Hollow", which is a Berea Sandstone formation in eastern Lake County. The "Hell" part comes from the ancient mental geography of "the underworld" or Tartarus in the greek mythology, so the steep decent of the park from the general relief of the surrounding landscape represented a journey to "hell". Obviously,  "cold" spot in such a place would be "the devil's icebox", which is also amusing because another folklore geography of "hell" is it's on fire even though the "underworld" is also associated with winter and Tartarus is cold in the greek mythical geography.

A very good example of how this folklore mindset forms is provided by role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, where a group of players improvise a shared hallucination... for those people the hallucination is like a movie playing in their minds eye. In the prior era of the mind, this scenario would happen, apparently, fairly often in people's down time, not as a role playing game, but as "shooting the shit" story telling. So a character like osiris or odin or thor would get a story and the universe would get a folklore mythological landscape, like for the Norse, there were 9 worlds.

So how does folklore turn into religion with priests and canonical stories? That's a really interesting one to think about.

The Previous Gods

The greek and norse mythology includes a concept of one or two prior "generations" of gods. For the greeks there were the Titans. For the norse, there were the Vanir who were later overthrown by the Aesir. This concept is even in the bible myths as "The Fallen Angels" who like the Titans are cast into Tartarus.

Some people think these stories encode a literal change of religion, so there was an older pantheon of gods that was supplanted by a new set of gods, maybe imposed via military conquest. Another interpretation is the changing of the gods represents various aspects of natural creation, like order replacing primordial chaos.

The conversion of european people to christianity offers some clues, potentially. There are some interesting hints that can be gleaned by comparing the extant norse mythology with the bible myths and the present day claims about the characters of the bible.

The norse myths are stories where the main characters like Odin or Thor are subject to the rules and forces of the universe, which are sometimes embodied in other characters like giant wolves or serpents. In fact, in the norse mythology the end of the gods, Ragnarok, is a prime feature of the tale. The characters like Odin are more like the main character of allegorical stories and represent aspects of human life, like the quest after wisdom and knowledge in his case. There's a separation between the "gods of forces", that is, the forces of the natural world like time, cold, heat, etc... The "gods", and then the human world.

I don't think anyone really knows what the pre-christian european "religious" practices were. There are a handful of clues left in history, but it was thoroughly wiped out. The extant mythology suggests it was a sort of shamanistic, maybe individual oriented religious practice, meaning, the people who had access to a shaman would maybe be coached in their life and spiritual journey via these stories, but who knows?

The set of beliefs people regard as "christian" is pretty interesting, because the core concepts of christianity are not found in the bible. In fact, it's sort of a mystery what purpose "the bible" served for "the church". The bible is a compilation of mediterranean world mythology that has a lot of similarities to the greek myths or even egyptian myths, including solar cycle characters like Dionysus or Osiris or Jesus who are "the sun on earth who turns into crops and dies and is reborn", plus the underworld character of Hades/Satan, the city founding twins, and so on.

The "religion" of christianity, though, is a mish-mash of greek philosophy and cliffs-notes and addenda to "the bible" mythology. Christianity was tied to various political attempts to reboot the Roman Empire, even within the ongoing eastern Roman Empire... So there's a "Tsar" (a Cesar) of Russia and an Eastern Orthodox Church, or various European Empires like the "Holy Roman" empire with an Emperor that's allied with the Catholic Church.

As an ingredient of a political project, then, the christian religion was meant to create a "roman" citizen out of europeans in the same way the school system, today, trains a person to be a member of the corporate/consumer society and the way the "media" blasts concepts into the brains of adults 24/7, or the way some clowns in an HR department send spam emails about pronouns or indigenous people's day or whatever.

The mythology of the chrisitian religion differs from the norse or greek myths on some key points. One of those is the god character names that were in the bible were stripped away. So in the norse religion there's Odin, Thor, Loki, Baldur, etc.... or the weekday names correspond to the prior era religions in most countries like Thursday is Thor's Day in the germanic countries and is Jueves (Jove/Jupiter) in Spain. In the christian relgious scheme, though, there is "god", and is regarded as a universal entity rather than a parochial "Yahweh" character or Zeus or Odin.

Also, along with this change in the prior era mythology, this generic "unnameable god" supplants the "gods of forces" and natural forces in the mythology of the norse or greek panetheons to whom the god characters are subject. This is an innovation of the christian religion and comes from greek philosophizing rather than anything found in the bible, which incorporates the mediterranean world's mythologies of creation. The nonsense concept of "the trinity" sums up the attempt to merge the god pantheon of the classical and ancient world with the "god of forces" characters, like the Titans or the Vanir of the norse myths. Some of the "reasoning" about god is still taught today in colleges in medieval philosophy courses. In retrospect as an advertising/propaganda talking point it is absurd. Their claim was basically "our god is the biggest and bestest" versus the prior brand of god.

Eventually, that propaganda invention killed the christian religion and its predecessors, and quite ironically, allowed the Titans to defeat the Olympians and effectively threw them into Tartarus. Now there's only a "god of forces", that is "nature".

"Last Year's Sun" Character

There are a handful of mythological characters from different cultures through history who represent the solar agricultural cycle. The egyptian characters provide a guide for the greek characters and the biblical characters. For example, the Osiris character is the sun on earth character who becomes crops and is then mutilated or cut up or otherwise horribly mistreated, which is a comical depiction of what happens to wheat. Similarly, wine gods are castrated (grapes cut off the vine), or torn to pieces by crazed (drunk) women, etc... Jesus is both a grain god and a wine god. He's flogged and beaten and put up on a trellis and pierced.

One of the really intriguing characters of the agricultural cycle is the "last year's sun" character. In the egyptian mythology it's Ra. Ra is also the underworld sun who goes through the underworld at night and fights Apep. In Greek mythology Ra turns into Hades/Pluto, the god of the dead, the underworld and wealth. The modern vampire character seems to be pressed out of the Hades mold. In the teen drama TV show "One Tree Hill", the character Dan is the Hades/Ra character. He's the rich father of the two main male characters. I can't remember the character names. One of those boys actually "dies" and is resurrected in a nod to the mythology. In the show he's a "harsh taskmaster" like Ra and he's wealthy like Hades.

"Wealth" is often just a version of stored or "last year's" sunlight. Even something like oil is just old solar energy. It's very likely the concept of a "loan" and interest originated with an ancient seed and grain monopoly. It's very interesting that "last years sun" turned into the concept of harshness and "evil". In the bible story of Cain and Abel, Cain is "cursed" to work and also ends up in the city and has become associated with "technology" (because he's Greek Prometheus). The "curse" is really to come under the thumb of Ra, or the last year's Sun character and all his bullshit, like contracts, which is really just a type of "curse".

Who's "Ra" in the bible myths? It's left somewhat ambiguous. In the egyptian myths "Ra" would match up with the God character of the bible, however in the greek myths, the Ra character is split into Zeus and Hades. Similarly in the bible there's the God character and the Satan character. Some commentators draw the conclusion they're the same, that is God=Satan. One of the interpretations is Satan is "the god of this world", that is the world of man. Like Hades or Ra, he's associated with "work" in that the curse of man is to "work" because Eve ate the apple, and the Satan character is also supposedly the secret father of Cain, which is even part of the story of One Tree Hill where the main solar hero character of the show is actually the illegitimate son of Dan, the Hades/Satan/Vampire figure.

I think what the Ra character ultimately represents, and the reason it becomes "evil" or scorned is that "wealth" is illusory. Take the concept of "stored work" as wealth like numbers in a bank account. Bitcoin fanbois imagine a bitcoin represents "stored work" in the hashing of the blockchain. This is a good representation of work in general. The blockchain is actually a representation of the increasing entropy of the universe--a bunch of burned fuel to make a pattern in computer memories, which are constantly eating energy, etc... Most of things people do to "create value" are mere transformations of an underlying substance, and in the case of agriculture, it "just happens" via nature.

In the mythology a character like Prometheus dies over and over because there's no "extracting value" or "storing value". The Hades/Ra character is a cheater or really a god of fraud in many cases because he can't provide the thing people really want.

Serious vs Play

The "Ant and the Grasshopper" fable is a great depiction of the "serious" mindset. In that fable, the ant is diligent, works, and is prepared for winter while the grasshopper messes around then starves. The "serious" mindset is really interesting to ponder. Where does it actually come from? What is it?

A variation on the "serious" mindset is the "security" mindset. One example of that is "coyote fear". In northeast Ohio most predators were extirpated by around 1900. Over the past 30 years or so, though, as the area transitioned from a rural/agricultural zone to suburbs and exurbs, coyotes moved in. Some cadre of people thinks they are very dangerous animals. A subset of those hysterical people think the presence of coyotes warrants wearing a sidearm when walking around in suburban or exurban parks. In reality, a coyote is a medium sized dog that avoids people. Other predators like eagles, possums, foxes are similarly dangerous to pets and farm animals, but the coyote gets weird fantastical status among local suburban retards.

"Folk concept" is another way of saying people rely on a prepackaged story based model for interpreting reality. A hysterical retard lady who sees a coyote when she's taking out her trash, for example, won't be able to ascertain it's a medium sized dog that poses no threat and runs away as soon as it sees a human, she'll only see the folk story version of a deadly predator. In some places and among some people that folk version of reality becomes the consensus view and when there is fear or some minor risk involved, it can foster a sort of mass hysteria.

In other cases, an individual's anxiety and phantasmagorical horror show understanding of reality doesn't extend beyond their inner world. I saw an interesting bodycam video a few days ago where a 74 year old man pulled a knife on an 11 year old. The old man was afraid of a kid riding a bike on the sidewalk so he threatened the boy with a knife. The old man was also carrying a loaded gun. In the old man's mind, he was maneuvering in a world of threats to his person and his fear justified his actions. This is the basis of the security mindset: fear and anxiety. However, in his case, his delusions were proprietary, rather than shared so he was arrested.

Anyway, I think the "serious" mindset is a variation on this same theme. It's a folk world view, or maybe a religious belief about the nature of reality. Essentially, if you don't "work hard", that is, be serious, god or reality will "punish" you. In some circumstances people believe this literally, that is, being frivolous is a sin which results in future punishment.

However, these same people also realize the converse scenario isn't a sure thing, that is "hard work" does not necessarily lead to success. In fact, it is often frustrated, so the folk concept of "man plans, god laughs" or the line "The best-laid plans of mice and men oft’ go awry” sums that folk view up.

I think those two concepts are fused together in the minds of many people, maybe especially european descended people. They believe in hard work, but know "luck" or good fortune or "god's favor" is actually the dominant force in the universe.

This topic takes me back to the "play" approach versus the serious mindset. Kids and young animals play to "develop". Their lack of experience makes them necessarily open minded, and often willing to experiment and push boundaries of what they think they can do. In the context of the adult world this can lead to innovation and new ways of understanding the world, or even just provides an individual with an opportunity to have their own experiences rather than living inside a folk model or religious delusion of reality.

An important element of these models of reality is it imposes a sorting process on the population. Let's take that 74 year old crazy man as an example. In his community, his delusion is personal, so he's jailed and forced to accept the nominal world view. However, in some scenario where everyone is equally a shithead about danger and every other man is packing a side arm because they think they might be attacked at any moment, he'd be right at home and the kid in that story and his family would move. In the "coyote fear" community, if you were a nature boy you'd leave so you could have a pet coyote, or hang out in peace with the critters.

Ironically, the "play" mindset seems like the big time winner for humans at least in terms of generating wealth, and it also seems to be associated with intelligence, while the serious people can be pretty stupid. A "folklore heavy" or religious community is often stifling and/or materially poor.

Status and Competitions

When I was a kid, there was a gradual transition in the organized activities kids participated in from "free form games" to structured competitions. I didn't really "get it" for a long time, that is, I was sort of stuck in the free form game mode when classmates were shifting into competition mode. I remember, for example, being kind of traumatized by the coaches and kids being "serious" about baseball when I was still in "game" mode when I was maybe 8 or 9.

At some point, even the tone of school changed similarly. In elementary school there weren't really grades. I think we got check marks or something like that, then in 6th grade/middle school there were "grades" and maybe even rankings of students. There were also myriad competitions in almost every activity, like in band there were rankings of players "1st chair", and so on, plus spelling bees, competitions in presentations, etc... Of course there were organized sports as well, so kids began training to be on the football team or whatever.

All the organized judging and rule based games are supposed to be training for "the real world", which is theoretically a bunch of similar competitions. I heard warnings from adults maybe 1,000 times that I'd be a loser if I didn't work hard, or that if I didn't buckle down and study I'd be a bum. As I noted in the previous post, "the loser" character is really the invisible fence of the boomer world, or the corporate/consumer society.

I guess the purpose, or maybe just a side effect of all the competitions in school is students internalize a phony model of reality, that is, there is a merit based hierarchy all throughout life that's determined by work and talent and judging. Maybe you suck at sports, but you can win the spelling bee, or maybe go to the chemistry olympics, or vice versa, you suck at chemistry class, but are a starter on the football team and so on. That is, there's always some "fair", real competition you can participate in.

One fairly useful observation is that almost every game is arbitrary and even the competitions are fraudulent or severely distorted in the sense that the rankings are really meaningless. For example, in high school football in the US, there are divisions of schools because some high schools only have 150 students and others have 3,000 so a kid who might be the quarterback on a Division IV football team might not even get on the varsity Division I football team. That's true in almost every type of organized sporting event I ever participated in as an adult. The competition is divvied up so people are participating against "peers" rather than the whole population of athletes, like in running races there are age groups, or in cycling races there are skill categories.

In professional sports, which is ostensibly the closest thing to the "real world" form of competition, that is an unlimited contest which reveals who is really the best, there are myriad arbitrary rules. In fact, in many pro sports the rules accumulate endlessly. In pro cycling, for example, there are all kinds of rules about how much your bicycle can weigh, what the geometry is, the position you can ride in, and on and on. Most pro or olympic level sports have all sorts of rules about the substances an athlete can take to eliminate the use of 'roids and HGH and such.

Another aspect of this competition internalization is people seek counterfeit representations of merit via "status" symbols like expensive cars and houses or sporting goods. In almost every case, a person gets their "status" object like a house with a giant pile of debt. Then they retain their status symbol by avoiding loser status, usually by grinding away at a shitty corporate job for their whole life. 

Anyway, quite ironically, it turns out that the elementary school view of games versus the high school competitions forever corresponds to the "real world". That is, there's no gamified reality except the shared hallucination of the general public who's been trained to participate in it.

"The Loser" is "The Wind Beneath My Wings"

I lived in two fairly distinct "worlds" through my life. I was born and raised and trained to live in the "boomer world", or corporate/consumer society, but I liked to be in "the woods". I think it's a really common story, especially when you add in all the other "worlds" people inhabit. For some people it's beach world, others it's boat world, or mountain world. That is, we'd all rather be in that other world than living the boomer world anxiety grind.

When I was in my 20s, I went on a vacation with my girlfriend at the time to the Allegheny National Forest. Her family had what they called a "camp" there. It was a small plot of land her father owned, which I think he inherited from his father, which had a trailer parked there. It was kind of a time capsule, because it was stocked with vintage stuff, like the prior generation of a radio, or a coffee maker, or whatever. It was all very basic, and it was obviously "fine" in fact it was a good place to live. Visiting that place demonstrated that the cost of living could be super low, and that life was very pleasant. I remember asking her why people like us would go "on vacation" away from the boomer world, but then repeatedly return to the boomer world. Neither of us had an answer. In fact, we both slowly transformed from granola/flannel/nature people to just another pair of yuppies. She went full yuppie and I was pretty reluctant and confused about that and really didn't know what I wanted to do with my life at the time.

When I was growing up my family went on vacation to a cabin in the Adirondacks a few times. The overall feel of the place was similar to "the camp". The cabin was setup in "lodge" style with pine furniture and similarly dated decor, probably from the early 1960s. (We were there in the 80s.) It was all pretty nice and relaxing. Inevitably we'd return to the boomer world, school, and my parents would go back to "the grind" and my sisters and I went to "kid grind" in school.

What actually keeps people in the boomer world instead of just slipping away to their version of the woods? I've been mulling this question over lately. One potential answer came to me via a very crude girl in a Midwest Safety Video. At some point in the video she (a drunk) becomes incredulous she's being arrested for DUI and she hilariously shrieks to her mom on the phone, "I'm not a nigger!" That video is a hall of famer bodycam edit.

That dumb moment shows one of the ways "it works". She doesn't mean "I'm not black", she really means "I'm not a low status person". People stay at the grind from "status anxiety".

There's a sort of generalized anxiety about maintaining status, meaning a social position, which is for the most part completely imaginary. I've been "out of work" a couple of times in my life. The first time I was laid off during the dot com implosion. I remember feeling sort of hollow and like a pretender once I wasn't working. I think that anxiety was due to my bad finances at the time. I needed to get a job to pay bills and keep my house and the like. I felt like a pretender because my boomer life really was a costume I was renting, including my house. If I were too long out of work, I'd end up homeless trash, that is, I'd lose my social status and fall out of what's essentially a club and it's not a very exclusive club.

Many retards who can barely do anything have fancy high paying jobs. When I was in college, I busted my ass in physics classes and was up late many nights a week studying and doing homework for several years. At the same time, shitloads of people in my school were just partying or taking dumb fuck business classes or whatever and as far as I know, none of those people ended up homeless.

When people have anxiety about losing health care coverage which is tied to their job, they really worry about bouncing down the status ladder into the poverty life because "the loser" is really the driving force in their existence, ironically.

Conversely when they have a job, the same people don't worry about their horrible diet, lack of exercise, totally sedentary life, etc... In fact, many people are sort of kept alive in spite of that unhealthy lifestyle by the medical system which gives them a pill for their ailments.

Anyway, ironically it's a sort of mythic "loser" which terrorizes the eternal boomer and keeps this shit show going. The "loser" is basically like an invisible fence for all the people who briefly escape on vacation.

Expert "How To" Videos

I've been watching youtube videos about cornering a mountain bike for a couple of weeks. I think the general category of expert "how to" videos is quite interesting and they show why the sci-fi nonsense sales pitch on "AI" is so dumb.

Many of the MTB cornering videos follow a "break down" approach, that is, they present cornering as a multi-phase, multi-step sequence. Step 1--look into the turn, step 2, lean the bike, step 3, position your body, etc... The concept is through repetition of the steps, a rider will become proficient at cornering.

That's not what happens at all though. What really happens is the riders brain and nervous system eventually encompass the bike so they can "feel" the tires on the ground and feel the orientation of their mass distribution on the bike. Once a person is an expert, they can ex post facto explain what their body is doing when they're cornering, or doing a hand stand, or whatever. To the novice, the word salad really isn't helpful. If anything it's kind of counterproductive.

I realize I don't have good feel for the bike's wheels. It's frustrating for me as a long time cyclist to throw away so much precious speed in a hundred corners by even feathering the brakes when I should be able to just rip through the corners. That said, I really do not want to crash and break the bike or my bones.

Anyway, it's obvious I will not learn anything from the videos; in fact there's really an obvious course toward improvement. Go to a free form loose ground area, like a big gravel parking lot, ideally with a slope, setup some "corners" by drawing them with a stick, then turn over and over and over and maybe take a video. The advantage of a parking lot is it's easier to repeat--more tries per unit time, plus a missed corner = rolling over a line instead of crashing into a tree.

The thing I'm really trying to do here is extend my nervous system to the contact patch of the tires and the ground. Currently, there's a big void there. Learning to ice skate or rollerblade is actually a very similar process. Prior to developing "feel" people are generally all "hands, head, and feet". If you watch a novice on rollerblades, they flail their arms around as their head and feet rotate around their center-of mass. They're generally oblivious to their center of mass, which is quite interesting.

Developing feel is a nonverbal process. Really words provide very little useful information for developing these skills. This is the severe limitation of so called "AI" because this concept of "feel" is pervasive in human endeavors.

In fact, it's possible to sort of flip this concept around entirely and see the effect of the dullard verbal mind model on the world. In general people dislike an irregular and even mildly challenging world where even the smallest obstacle is intolerable. They do not want to learn anything, ever. They don't want to condition their body for balance or strength or mobility. They don't even want to pay attention when they do something insipidly simple, like drive a car. It'd be good to understand what they really want. Like what's the goal of the average person when they're doing all the nonsense stuff they do?

The Willforce Delusion

It's quite common for people to imagine their "will force" somehow affects real world events. One example of that is focusing attention on a sporting event. People imagine they are "urging" a player to score a touchdown in a football game, for example, when they intently watch. This happens in all sorts of relationship scenarios as well, from the mundane work relationship to an intense romantic relationship.

It's all entirely, equally imaginary. There's no "will force", however, almost anybody reading this will understand what I'm writing about here. The fictional concept of "telekinesis" is the same thing. That is, in fiction, some character will be able to move an object with his or her "mind". It's often depicted as severe mental "exertion" to the point of causing a nose bleed, which is supposed to be blood leaking from the taxed brain,  I guess.

This is an interesting case of something that doesn't exist at all, that is "will force", turning into an idea that multitudes of people have. So where does the concept even come from?

All through life people "want" things. I can remember being a kid and fervently wanting some dumb toy or whatever, or as a young adult getting into messy romantic relationships and wanting some girl or young woman fervently or being wanted the same way by different women. The "want" existed as a sort of pressure. That pressure is almost certainly physical and hormonal and about procreation in the sex scenario. There are many examples of that same type of behavior among animals.

It seems plausible that the mental machinery of "want", which is actually an internal compulsion could lead to the idea that "wanting hard enough" will cause things to happen in the real world or even move. For some people this "willforce" delusion manifests as a desire for obsessive overall control and the idea that everything can and should be managed (by them).

A Fancy Pants House is Stupid

I got in the habit of watching youtube bodycam videos a few months ago. I'd like to know who the OG bodycam video content makers are because it was an ingenious idea. The footage is public record, so there's and endless supply of often compelling, funny and dramatic real-world content available to serve up to the public.

There's some minimal dose of bodycam videos that will lead the most blue-haired progressive lesbian democrat "them" to the conclusion that loads of black people are dysfunctional and stupid. For example, there's a bodycam video of a shooting and inexplicably nonsense chaotic aftermath where a crowd of maybe 50 black people swarm around the fallen guy to: 1.) rob him and 2.) freak out hysterically. While they scream out for someone to help, they simultaneously prevent the police from rendering first aid and even assault the cops who are trying to help. Nothing in the video "makes sense".

The problem with this criticism of the black people isn't that it's "racist", it's that it is implicitly based on the notion that whitey "has it all figured out" and that the white people society and methods of organization are rational and therefore optimal because the white people individually are rational. This is obviously not true.

One example of irrational behavior that applies to almost everyone in the US, but maybe especially the "upper class" white people is the pursuit of luxury, and luxury housing in particular. This topic is apparent to me because I think about what my family "should do" with our house and property on a regular basis.

We have an ideal parcel of land in an ideal location, but the house is kind of dumpy and tired out. It turns out, though, that the dumpy house works in our favor because it keeps our property taxes, one of our only housing related "fixed" expenses, as low as possible. In fact, it would make sense to reduce those as much as possible by minimizing the market value of the home, while at the same time maximizing the property's real productive capacity, e.g. farming or the like. That is you can add "real utility" to a property without the county auditor giving you a higher tax bill. Now that I understand this strategy, I see other people doing the same thing here and there in my neighborhood.

This is what everyone should be doing in my area if they were practical/pragmatic people, but typically they do the opposite, that is, they maximize the nominal and imaginary value of their property so they pay maximally high property taxes. For example, there are several couples living in $800,000 McMansion homes in the immediate area. The maintenance and taxes on their property is probably 5x ours, but there's nothing that comes from that extra expense. Typically they do nothing productive with their property, like running a farm. It's just all expense and lots of extra maintained space for a couple of people. It's actually stupid and counterproductive and keeps people running on the work treadmill for extra years of their life because all they really care about is totally imaginary status.

In many cases the people who live the imaginary status luxury life are really in dire financial straights to appear wealthy. They live on loans and can't even really afford to maintain their McMansion, and certainly can't afford to burn $30,000 on new car cost every few years, but they do that also.

Anyway, as per usual, when the mass of people does something it's almost by definition "wrong".

 

Serious vs Play

I had two types of study-halls in High School. One was modeled on prison life and was like punishment by pure boredom and was no different than "detention". The students sat on one side of tables in a big room and were only allowed to do some quiet thing, like read, do homework, or doodle or just sit and stare. The other type was free-form and students could do whatever they want, like playing games, or laughing and joking around. I have no idea why some study halls were fun and the others were like prison, I guess it must have been up to the teacher running it.

In retrospect, it's obvious a big component of primary education is training students to be obedient "workers". For example, there are a lot of jobs where people believe they must surrender their human freedom when they're on the clock, so if there's nothing to do, they'll just sit around and stare at a computer screen or sweep an already clean floor or whatever until the clock magically frees them.

Those people have internalized a "serious" life, maybe from things like study halls. It's often instructive to lookup the etymology of a label like "serious". The day-to-day meaning of it comes from a feeling; everyone knows the feeling of being serious. Appropriately, scholars think the word comes from an ancient root word for "heavy". Being serious is the equivalent of telekinetically trying to move a heavy weight. People do that all the time. They imagine exerting their internal will-force has a real-world effect, when it has zero real world effect. That particular delusion is fascinating.

The opposite of a serious life is a frivolous or play life... not surprisingly the origin of that word is "light" as in "a light weight". Sometimes in the "fun study hall" my friends and I would get in trouble for having too much fun. For example, in one of those, we invented a game that involved a baseball made of taped up paper. I don't recall exactly how it worked, but someone would pitch, and someone would bat. The group of kids probably got too loud so we were chided for "playing". The collective idea in the school was the study hall should be in that punishment/serious mindset, I suppose.

Play and creativity go together, while "seriousness" generally inhibits creativity. My first "real" job was at a tree farm when I was 16 and it epitomized that "serious" mindset. The overall concept of that tree farm was "work is serious" in the sense that it should be simple and sort of stupid and kind of a workout and strength training exercise. 

One of the tree farm tasks for the kids was to go pickup the newly cut rounds of fallen trees and process them into firewood. We'd load them on a trailer, then put them one-by-one onto a hydraulic log splitter in wood barn and break them into firewood. The firewood was piled up in the barn where it dried. People would buy the wood by the pickup truck bed, which is obviously a totally arbitrary unit, and we'd toss it into the back. When I was just 16, I could see the workflow could be more efficient, even with just the primitive tools the farm had, but the point wasn't to improve things, it was to "work hard", that is, stupidly. I only worked there for a couple weekends.

The "play/creative" mindset won out massively over my Gen-X life and the "serious mindset" people ate it on the societal and individual level. Being "serious" is a sort of self-imposed punishment. Let's return to the tree farm example for a very obvious case of creativity winning out. Over the decades since I was un-ergonomically loading rounds into a hydraulic log splitter, people build log processor equipment that automated that whole process. One guy can generate a mountain of firewood in a couple hours by loading a tree trunk onto a machine with another machine like a tractor or skidsteer.

That "serious" mindset still managed to partially infect me in spite of seeing it for what it is. It's difficult to fully embrace philosophical absurdism and be freed from all the years of training by dullards. The training should be about an ability to focus and concentrate when needed as a tool rather than merely appearing to do so, or worse yet by "obeying" some dumb ass teacher in a school setting.

 

What is Anxiety?

I ride the Big Creek Park mountain bike trail multiple times a week. I eek out a little more speed almost every session. Since I just started riding there last fall, the steps of my progression are fairly obvious to me. I'm about 50% faster than I was when I started, mainly due to improved technique and skill rather than improved aerobic capacity.

One that stands out is I had an issue with hand numbness for the first few months I was riding, which is now all but gone. The reason is apparent, too, I used to forcefully grip the bars, now I barely squeeze them. That happened "by itself". The mountain bike teachers have a maxim "heavy feet/light hands" to teach this concept, but for me it mostly happened because I was trying to be relaxed and not waste energy by "fighting the bike", which happens on the road as well.

"Fighting the bike" means you're wasting precious watts by exerting nonsense forces on the bike. It can happen from exhaustion, ironically, or a condition that's similar to daily life "anxiety". The anxiety case is pretty interesting because it has broad daily life application.

There are a couple of sections of the Big Creek trail that took several months of attempts for me to even finish successfully, that is, ride without getting off the bike. One is a steep twisty uphill section which is crowned by a large beech tree root. The root looks like a stair step at the top of a steep, dusty 10-20 foot climb. When you're a novice mountain biker, it seems implausible a person could ride up such an obstacle, but it's actually pretty "easy" for me now.

For the novice many things are "unknowns", like what happens if you can't ride up that hill and fall off awkwardly? It's an "oh shit" moment when you ride around a corner and see such a thing for the first time. That's where anxiety kicks in, when it's actually least useful and is totally counterproductive. When you "fight the bike" with mind and body, you're all but certain to fail riding over any obstacle. Situational awareness flies out the window, and the body goes ridgid into a sort of fighting mode, which is completely counter productive.

I think that type of anxiety is really an evolutionary "brace for impact" adaptation. One common version of that is the "sympathetic grunt" when you see another person fall awkwardly. The person who is falling will often make a sort of grunt or groan even before they hit the ground, and if there's a person or crowd watching, even on video, they'll involuntarily make a similar noise, which I think is essentially stiffening the ribs with positive air pressure... it's basically like a human air bag deployment. That type of anxiety is an involuntary response. It goes away with experience in the mountain bike obstacle scenario.

The daily life cousin of that type of anxiety is the phantasmagorical imagining of some bad scenario, which is also counterproductive and maladaptive. It's also a "brace for impact" scenario, but it can play out indefinitely just in the mind. Ironically, the source of this form of anxiety is the notion that a person is "in control" through planning and intention, which is also ultimately where the mountain bike obstacle angst comes from.

On the MTB, the trail goes over the obstacle, so the rider must navigate it or jump off the bike before it turns into a crash and maybe injury or a broken bike even though the trail and the situation is completely contrived. The anxiety arises from a faux "goal".

The day to day life anxieties are really similar. A contrived, typically accidental scenario induces angst: "If I don't do XYZ, I might lose my job!" or some romantic scenario might completely occupy the mind or money trouble might plague a person's thoughts.

The MTB obstacles are basically the point of riding the mountain bike. The first time I cleared that hill, I was completely thrilled. Really, every time I do it now, I get a little rush. The Big Creek trail is loaded with 1000 similar obstacles.

People have wildly more anxiety about life situations that are extremly boring and not dangerous at all and are mostly phantasms. They think their neighbors and friends are laughing at them if they don't have the right car or if their grass is too long or their hair isn't blond enough or they're too fat or too thin or their teeth aren't white enough or whatever. A great example of how insane such people can get is offered by "Asian Plastic Surgery" youtube channels

The Ancient Seed Monopoly

There's kid lore in Chardon, Ohio that was passed down for generations. The lore is there is a tunnel network from Rocky Cellar, which is sandstone bedrock outcropping off Basquin Drive, up to the county courthouse about a mile away, and perhaps there is a tunnel network through all the sandstone to various places.

I think that story is a great example of how folk stories, in that case a kid folk story, encode actual information: the original detailed information is boiled off and jumbled up with generic archetypes. In that story case, a historical event, was replaced with a generic "secret tunnel" narrative. The historical event was a town official hid court records in Rocky Cellar during the war of 1812. The story also encodes the prevalent underlying sandstone bedrock in Chardon. The boring details of that original historical event got replaced with something interesting.

In some cases, historical events that are interesting in and of themselves retain their original narrative form. A good example of that is "Brady's Leap" in Kent, Ohio and the associated frontier adventure story. Since the event was cool and kick ass, the man's name and the details of the event is in the lore.

The vampire character blends together many real world concepts into a mythological character. One that I think is particularly intriguing the the element of the Hades/Persephone story that involves pomegranate seeds. Hades basically gets to keep Persephone because she ate the pomegranate arils. I read/heard many attempts to explain this element of the story.

Persephone being married to Hades is a seasonal myth. Hades is the king of the underworld, which is often equated with winter, that is the dead time of the year. To a modern person it doesn't make any sense that the king of the underworld and especially winter world would also be associated with wealth, which is the lean time of the year. Hades association with wealth spills over into the vampire myth: Dracula is even a "Count" and he lives in a castle.

The Arils component of the story involves "a deal" that Persephone broke, or was tricked into, depending on the version of the story. Why would that element of the story hang around for thousands of years?

I think that story is really about an ancient "seed monopoly" from the dawn of agriculture. I think that's also where the concept of interest comes from. This is also why "Hades" is associated with wealth, not the common interpretation that the concept was all wealth came from the underworld... which also makes no sense, unless you're talking about a mine, like a silver mine, which was another thing which was frequently monopolized.

Death and blood are at the core of the Hades/Vampire story for fairly obvious reasons... how is a monopoly built and maintained? murder and destruction.

The Book of Enoch and "The Jews"

In a previous post about the "cultural significance" of Star Wars versus the near insignificance of the movie Avatar I pointed out two narratives that permeate pop culture movies and TV shows and also the bible, which is really Star Wars + Avatar. There are basically three core narratives to discuss here:

• The Osiris Cycle, or the Demeter/Persephone Cycle (crops and winter);
• Moonman/woman and Sunman versus winterman;
• Rich people form a slave colony (Book of Enoch and Avatar, and 10,000 BC).

The Osiris cycle is "the sun" comes to Earth and is embodied in the crops like wheat or grapes, dies, and mutilated, and is reborn. In the Osiris story (there are some different versions), Osiris gets put into a tight fitting casket (wheat storage) and floated down a river (shipped). He's eventually reborn via artificial means (planted). In the grape crop based versions of the stories the plant-embodied-sun gets castrated (grapes cut off), and then torn to pieces by mad women in one case, stomped and mashed and made into wine. Jesus is wheat cult + wine cult. The violence in these stories should be regarded as looney tunes or Final Destination style cartoon violence where the character of Osiris, Jesus, or Dionysus is the personification of wheat (which used to be literally flailed by workers) or grapes.

The Demeter/Persephone/Hades version of this story is Persephone is "kidnapped" and kept in the underworld by Hades who is the wealthy king of the dead, and she is released in spring. One of the reasons Persephone is kept by Hades is she ingests Pomegranate seeds. Hades morphed into a vampire in modern times. He represents the never ending seed monopoly/finance scheme still used today.

The adventures of Moonman/woman and Sunman (the first released Star Wars movies Han/Leia and Luke) are another seasonal cycle story and the Osiris cycle provides the background. One example of that is Luke ends up hanging upside down in the ice cave on Hoth (winter planet, Luke/Sun in the south, i.e. upside down).

The "rich people form a slave colony" story is the Book of Enoch and Avatar, and maybe more interestingly Stargate and 10,000 BC. The TV series "The 100" is another example of this core narrative. The "rich people" slave colony story of the book of Enoch ends up in the bible in the Cain character and his city founding. This thread is also present in the Epic of Gilgamesh, who's a "nephilim" as described in the book of Enoch.

The Stargate and 10,000 BC movies depict the bible jews. I think the current concept of "jews" is a mangled, nonsense concept. The depiction of spece jews in the Stargate and 10,000 BC movies makes sense with respect to the Enoch narrative.

In Stargate the jews are the people who are contacted by people from Earth, that is, the advanced civilization. The character Skaara takes on the Enoch role. The name "Enoch" means "to train" or "initiated". In Stargate the Americans find these space jews ensalved to the Egyptians/Goauld snake people. In 10,000 BC, the white people find the first civilization people enslaved by the Atlanteans... and in that scenario the "slaves" are a rando assortment of people who are "the jews". Jews are the bamboozled slaves of an "advanced" slaver civilization rather than an ethnicity. Today an American is enmeshed in the slaver civilization system, but "American" is not an ethnicity.

Dojo Appeal

The corporate/consumer system in the United States is a soft version of military life, specifically life on a ship. Sadly, people are trained for it from the time they're a toddler. Kids get shipped off to "kindergarten" to get used to authority figures giving them orders and spending all their time on a controlled schedule inside an institutional building where their movements are controlled by institutional paperwork and orders like "hall passes". It's not even an American concept; it came from inbred Prussian lizard people.

A big component of the "midlife crisis" is the realization that life spent in this system is a waste. For many people, it's not so much a "realization", that is a conscious, well formed thought, it's more of a feeling that plays out in mute desperation and acting out. The certainty of mortality, and the corresponding preciousness of one's life collides with the absurdity of masses of people living under the thumb of a bunch of greedy cockroaches who have bamboozled the multitudes.

This realization is also why movies like They Live attain a "cult" following. It allows the audience to "externalize" this model of control, that is, the narrative of the movie allows one to be like a fish that climbs out of the fish bowl and see it for what it is.

However, once a person "can see", a possibly harsher reality is everyone now "needs" this pile of trash system because it makes almost everything including the most essential items like food and controls the distribution of everything with funny money.

That said, many of the things people do are purposely and firmly outside the corporate/consumer system. I experience one successful, very good example of that on a regular basis when I do my mountain biking hobby. I go to a public park and ride a trail that was built and maintained by volunteers who receive no compensation other than the ability to ride their bike.

After a summer storm, the trail can be impassible since it's in the woods and many branches and even whole trees or large chunks of a dying tree will fall on the trail... but they will disappear as if "by magic" over maybe a half a day. The "magic" is rando mountain bikers moving them or chopping them up. I've done it myself. A portion of the trail is only ~1200 feet away from my couch through the woods. I dragged a chainsaw over there and chopped up a log and cleared the trail because I wanted to ride the next day.

There are many other models of organization that match the mountain bike hobby and trail construction such as a dojo, which is maybe the most appealing one for free and productive people. Models like cults and religious orders maintain elements of corporate and military organizations that aren't appropriate to free men.

I never really thought about the word dojo and its inherent relationship to "the way", i.e. "do". A dojo is a place where you practice "the way" of a discipline like martial arts. The idealized dojo is organized like the mountain bike hobby, not like a corporation or military unit or public schools. If there's a hierarchy, it's a real hierarchy. The teacher is not an authority figure because of a title, but has natural authority versus a student who wants to learn "the way".

Many people have noticed this concept and tried to apply it to the tech industry or other commercial endeavors but it doesn't really work because someone is trying to get paid, which corrupts the structure and imposes a false hierarchy of "owner ship", which is the thing at the root of the corporate trash system. As observers like Jordan Maxwell pointed out, the "ship" is at the core of this thing.

Complexity of the Information Dimension

This past weekend I went for a bike ride on Butternut Road from Munson over to Burton. It was a perfect, bright, sunny and windy day and that road is picturesque. It goes through a handful of river valleys. The Chagrin, the West Branch of the Cuyahoga, and the East Branch of the Cuyahoga and has lumpy, rolling hills and open grassy fields with horses and other farm animals all along the way.

I'm on a geology kick lately and "see" the glacial deposition, which geologists gave a bunch of names like Kames, Hummocky Moraines and the like. That route passes over several different such regions, which are complex there because the road passes over three sandstone highlands. One of them even has a name "Maple Hill" which is Auburn Road near Cedar and Butternut.

The "experience" of riding combines with the maps I've been looking at for a couple of weeks to generate a new combination of observations in my mind, and my mind only, that is in the "information dimension" where my personal Thomas Anderson character exists. I have an understanding of the difference in elevation of the Cuyahoga Formation and the Sharon Conglomerate sandstone highlands and how that's filled in with glacial till because of the effort involved to climb various hills, or drop down various descents.

The (abrigded) etymology of "experience" is instructive here, it's "ex" (out of) "peritus" (testing). Also "expert", which is someone who had experiences basically. "Experiential" learning is much deeper than mere symbolic learning, which is basically a huge waste of time. It's wild that almost the whole population of a country like the USA flushes away their prime growing and learning years soaking in a soup of disconnected factoids preached by teachers who similarly don't "know" anything.

It makes sense that culture would go hog wild on these dumb fuck LLMs. The emphasis on a jumble of pure symbolic nonsense with zero experience goes hand in hand with rote "learning" and assemblies of facts. All the "actual" knowledge, like all the nutrition is in the experience not the words. That huge sea of information is not available to machines, it can barely be shared from human to human.

Anyway, this takes my back to an immense divide between "experts" and "dilettantes" and poseurs. The expert lives in the deep complexity of the information dimension. The dilettante lives "off the cuff" and on whims. I think the US ruling class is very toxic poseurs. I'm sure there's a bunch of such people, like CEOs saying things like, "What does the AI say about it?" in meetings all the time now.

The vacuum/negative space this black hole of foolishness is creating might give birth to another wisdom tradition in the US.